


Extraction

by WorryinglyInnocent



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: (eventually) - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Multi, Rumbelle - Freeform, Swanfire - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-05
Updated: 2017-06-15
Packaged: 2018-03-10 16:16:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 56,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3296723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WorryinglyInnocent/pseuds/WorryinglyInnocent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Intelligence Agent Belle French has been given her most challenging assignment yet – one that will provide her agency with absolutely vital information on a practically untouchable arms dealer.</p><p>In addition to all the usual dangers any assignment carries, Belle also faces the edifying task of convincing Rum Gold to return to help the agency one last time. Agent Gold left the world of international espionage years ago, after an assignment went terribly wrong and ended in his imprisonment and torture, and he vowed never to return, but the agency cannot complete their mission without him…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Most of my knowledge of the world of espionage comes from John le Carré and I gratefully borrow a lot of his jargon. Some of it comes from Spooks.
> 
> The intelligence agency and most of the countries mentioned herein are entirely fictional. I just felt that it was safer that way.

It should have been a perfectly ordinary day – in as much as a day spent working for an intelligence agency was every ordinary. Belle had expected a nice, quiet shift spent writing up about six reports that various emergencies meant she had not had chance to work on, and just generally staying off Blue’s radar. Sadly, as soon as she got into the office, she knew that this was not going to be the case. Emma was standing at the door waiting for her, and Belle’s shoulders sagged.

“What’s gone wrong now?” she groaned, dumping her things on her desk and making to follow Emma down the corridor to their meeting room. “Can we go one day without a threat to national security?”

“Nope,” Emma replied cheerfully. “Come on, Belle, you love it really. This is what you signed up for when you joined, isn’t it? Being a hero and saving the world?”

“Yes, I just wish that it would stay saved for a couple of days to let me finish the paperwork from the last time it needed saving. I’ve still got debrief reports from my Turkey trip kicking around in my drawer. Blue’s going to do her nut if I don’t get them finished soon. I wouldn’t mind but she’s the one who keeps giving me extra assignments, so she can hardly complain when I’m overworked.”

Emma laughed. “Well, Blue’s never been logical, for as long as you or I have worked here.”

“Hmm. Who else is coming to this meeting?” Belle asked, trying to distract herself away from the ominous thoughts of the stacking paperwork that was no doubt going to be added to her in-tray once the briefing was over. Emma’s happy demeanour fell momentarily.

“It’s all the Avalon specialists,” she said. “You, me, David Nolan; they’ve even got Archie Hopper up from communication HQ.”

Belle suppressed a groan. It _had_ to be Avalon. Just when they thought that everything was finally nice and stable again, something catastrophic had to happen to upset it again. Avalon was a newly independent country, indeed, it had only gained its independence twenty-five years ago after a very brutal war, and it had been at the top of the agency’s watch list ever since. Avalon had caused them more grief and heartache than it was worth, and Belle held the dubious honour of being considered an expert in its language and rather tumultuous history, despite never actually having set foot in the country.

Once they reached the meeting room, it was clear from the set around the table that Belle and Emma were the last to arrive. Blue was standing at the head of the room, a grim expression on her face.

“Agent Swan. Agent French. Thank you for joining us.”

Belle ignored the admonition in Blue’s voice; if they had wanted her to come to an early morning meeting then they should have given her more warning than Emma waiting for her when she walked in. Blue indicated for the two new arrivals to take their seats. No-one called her Fae, although everyone else at the agency was on friendly first name terms with each other. Blue was part of that previous generation, back when espionage was done differently. Back when Avalon had still been fighting for its independence and its corrupt new government had been striking if not fear then definite nervousness into the hearts of international powers everywhere. Blue was old school. Behind closed doors it was often commented that she didn’t belong in the new administration, but no-one had the guts to suggest that she took a step back and let young blood take over her section; that of Avalon, Mist Haven and their other unstable neighbours. Blue had been in charge ever since Operation Foresight had failed, and it was only because she had lived through Foresight and had the first-hand experience that she had remained in her position of power, the dinosaur in charge of her section. She was a small woman, almost fairy like in appearance, with a disarmingly youthful face despite being well into her fifties. If you passed her on the street you’d have thought she was a nun, Belle thought dryly, such was her conservative attire. She tried to count how many times Blue had shot her disapproving looks for clicking around the office in her high heels, but she’d given up; it was too many to count.

“Ladies, gentlemen,” Blue began. “You probably all realise why you are here, so I will get straight to the point. The Avalon lines have picked up an inordinate amount of chatter recently, no doubt this has come through the various channels to you.”

At the other end of the conference table, Archie Hopper nodded and gave a tremendous yawn that he didn’t even try to hide. Blue glared at him but he either didn’t notice her or didn’t care. Belle felt a pang of sympathy for him. He’d probably been monitoring the Avalon lines around the clock for the past few days and now he was being called into meetings at what was, for a regular night-shift worker, ridiculous o’clock in the morning.

“Cora Mills is on the move,” he finally managed to say before succumbing to another yawn. “Her daughter’s officially engaged to Leo White now.”

Belle eyebrows shot to her hairline. There had been rumours for months but never confirmation. No wonder everyone was worried.

Aside from its bloody war of independence from the much larger country of Mist Haven, Avalon was famous for three things: diamond mining, weapons manufacture, and bribery. Cora Mills embodied all three of these. Mills Corp was Avalon’s largest luxury goods exporter, second largest armaments exporter, and most definitely the largest influence on the weak young government. In armaments, the only one of the three in which Cora did not hold the monopoly, Leo White was the largest figure.

After a lot of investigation into his activities, Leo had washed as clean as his name and was graded Persil: of absolutely no interest to the agency at all beyond the fact he lived in a country with an unstable political climate. To all intents and purposes he was a genuinely nice, if slightly dim, man who despite being in the business of producing things that were ultimately going to kill people, just wanted to make sure that his young daughter grew up safe and happy. Cora Mills could not have been more opposite to him if she had tried. She was scheming, greedy, and she’d been supplying arms to terrorists for as long as anyone cared to remember.

(Well, she’d been doing it ever since Operation Foresight went wrong, and no-one cared to remember that. Whenever it was brought up by a new recruit who had heard about it on the grapevine, one of the older hands who’d been with the agency at the time or who’d had to deal with the fallout always shut them up.)

Cora was ruthless and untouchable. Her links to the government kept her protected and her empire just kept growing. A marriage between Cora’s daughter, Regina, and Leo White was definitely cause for concern. It would not be long before Cora had control of Leo’s business, whether through means legal or otherwise, and then she really would be unstoppable, and terror organisations the world over would have access to the finest and highest quality prototype weaponry before any agency in the world could try to think up counter measures.

But all the same… Belle narrowed her eyes because there had been rumours about this engagement for months and the agency had been making contingency plans for almost as long. Ok, the engagement was official now, but it was not incredibly big news. It was not the kind of news that warranted an unscheduled meeting like this.

“What can we do about it?” David Nolan asked. “We can’t simply walk in there and when it comes to the ‘does anyone know of any just cause or impediment?’ bit stand up and say yes, we do, on account of impending international terrorism.”

Blue smiled, her slightly nasty smile that looked incredibly innocent and always came before a big reveal. Belle recognised that smile, and she hated it.

“We had a flash message from Agent Mallory at the residency in Avalon early this morning.”

That got everyone’s attention. Flash was the most urgent priority of message and the Avalon residency – a tiny little office in Avalon’s capital city run by three agency staff to keep track of their network of assets and double agents and control information at its source – never used flashes except in an absolute emergency.

“Last night, Mal was contacted by one of her assets who’s been keeping tabs on Regina Mills – she’s been under increased surveillance since the rumours about her and White started. Regina approached him with a message for us. She wants to defect. She wants safety in this country, away from her mother, and in return she will tell us everything she knows about Cora’s empire, her plans and her associates.”

There was silence around the conference table. This news really was unprecedented. Cora Mills was notoriously untrusting and secretive – understandable given her questionable dealings. The only person whom she trusted implicitly with all of her affairs was her daughter whom she was grooming to take over her business, and now said daughter was prepared to betray her.

“Why now?” David asked. “You have to admit that this offer is too good to be true. You know what happened the last time that we tried to get to Cora Mills.”

_Foresight._ No-one needed reminding of their catastrophic failure there.

“Cora is forcing her daughter to marry Leo White,” Blue said plainly. “Regina doesn’t want to. Her relationship with her mother has always been strained and sources tell us it shows hallmarks of being abusive. Regina has just turned twenty years old and is only just an official adult in Avalon; as you know they take adulthood to begin at twenty rather than eighteen like we do. She’s been granted a sliver more independence than she had before. The official announcement of the engagement coincides with her coming of age. Mal says that she wouldn’t be surprised if she’s been planning this for a while.”

“All the same,” Emma said. “Can we trust her? Are we sure we’re not just walking straight into another trap?”

Everyone was hazy on the details of Operation Foresight, but everyone knew that ‘walking straight into a trap’ summarised it quite well.

“The only thing we can do is take the bait,” Blue said. “The wedding between Regina and Leo takes place in six weeks’ time and we are never going to have another opportunity like this.” Her face looked slightly pained and Belle immediately knew that there was more to be said.

“There is, however, a catch,” the older woman finally continued. “Regina’s defection comes with conditions. Understandably, the poor girl is terrified, and she has requested that a particular agent of ours goes over to bring her in, because she knows of him and trusts him. She won’t co-operate unless she meets him. Unfortunately the agent in question left the agency fifteen years ago.”

Immediately, everyone in the room knew who they were talking about.

Agent Gold, the major casualty from Operation Foresight other than the agency’s pride and credibility. He’d spent six years in prison in Avalon before the agency had managed to get him back, and he’d not been heard of since. It was no secret that he’d been horrifically tortured, no secret that he hated Blue with a passion, and no secret that he wanted nothing to do with Avalon or the agency again.

“It’s a trap,” David said flatly. “It’s got to be. With a demand like that, it has got to be a trap.”

“We have to take the bait,” Blue repeated, her voice firm and non-negotiable. “We know things now that we did not know back then. We have the back up from the residency which we did not have back then, and of course, we will not send him in alone…”

“If you can even convince him to do it,” Archie muttered.

“That will not be a problem,” Blue said coolly. Belle did not like the assured tone in her voice. “Agent French, I would like you to take the lead for this operation.”

Belle was slightly taken aback. Individual assignments were one thing, but leading a team on an assignment of this calibre – possibly a suicidal one at that – was something else entirely. “Please assemble your team. I’d like you to liaise with Agent Mallory at the residency and set up the circumstances for a preliminary meeting with Regina and, if all goes according to plan, her extraction. The first thing that you will need to do of course is establish contact with Gold.”

Blue sighed. “Although there has been a lot of debate on the subject, the powers that be have insisted upon the declassification of Operation Foresight so that we can avoid a similarly spectacular failure this time round. It always pays to learn from your mistakes, they say.” Blue walked around the table, handing out copies of a thick case file to the gathered agents. “I would appreciate it if this incredibly embarrassing chapter of our agency’s history does not leave our section.”

Belle looked down at the files in front of her. _Operation Foresight_. She snorted. Really, it should have been called hindsight, the amount that they had learned from it. There, stamped in bright red ink, were the damning letters FUBAR. Fucked up beyond all recognition. Of course it was. They’d lost an agent. Even the operations that were deemed successful and everyone applauded were always fucked if they’d lost an agent. Blue never saw it that way though. Success was success, no matter how many were lost along the way. The idea of a pyrrhic victory did not seem to occur to her.

Belle turned the first page of the file and looked at the photograph there, slightly grainy but clear enough. It depicted a man in his late twenties, perhaps early thirties. That was Agent Gold, as he had been before it all went wrong and his life was spectacularly ruined. Belle felt so sad for him. Losing an agent to death was one thing. It was over then. They were laid to rest and their souls could move on. Losing an agent to capture was quite another, and Belle thought that in many ways, that must be worse. For six years he’d had to endure torture and imprisonment, not knowing if he would ever see his home again, not knowing if anyone was even trying to get him back or not. She wondered what it must have been like for him, sitting in a cell year after year, and she shuddered. Belle did not fear death, she accepted its inevitability and the fact that her profession made it a far more likely possibility for her than others. But torture, that she did fear. She had done all her counter-interrogation training and that had been horrible enough, but at the point in time when it had all happened, Avalon had not been recognised as a country by many nations and had not signed any international treaties on human rights. All kinds of terrible methods of causing psychological and physical pain had been open to them, and she dreaded to think what Agent Gold had been through.

“That will be all,” Blue said. “Agent French, I expect a progress report twenty-four hours from now.”

Belle nodded dumbly, continuing to read the Foresight file. Blue left them in the meeting room.

“What’s your plan, chief?” Emma asked eventually.

Belle shook her head. “I have no idea, other than sending Archie home to his bed. I need to read this behemoth first, so that we know what we’re up against.”

“We all know what we have to do first,” David said gloomily. “We have to find Gold and convince him to come with us.”

Belle thought about Blue’s earlier words: _“That will not be a problem.”_

She got the distinct feeling that Blue had something on Gold, and she was determined to find out what it was.

For now though, she had to get to the bottom of this case file. In their line of work it never, ever paid to underestimate one’s enemy.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whilst this is a fictional intelligence agency, it’s based predominantly in the UK like all my AU’s – I understand my home country much better than America!
> 
> Also, I wrote this before I saw Kingsman, so I have only just noticed the similarities between the House and the HQ building in Kingsman. They are unintentional!

Belle was quite certain that she had never been to Scotland when it wasn’t cold, grey and wet, and she was quickly becoming convinced that the country did not in fact have any other weather.

It had taken them a while to track down Gold. After leaving the agency he had done his absolute utmost to become untraceable. In the end it was Granny who’d provided the key that had led to his whereabouts.

‘Granny’ Lucas, now retired, had been the longest-serving head of the House that the agency had ever known. All agents who’d spent long periods of time abroad – be it manning residencies, doing deep undercover work or, in the rarer cases, having been captured and imprisoned, came back to the House for debrief. It was a huge stately home in the heart of the countryside, about an hour’s drive from HQ and conveniently located in the easily defensible middle of nowhere. It had been specifically refurbished to meet all the agency’s needs and boasted state of the art medical equipment and training facilities. The complex provided rest and rehabilitation for repatriated agents, but also served as a training base, and more sinisterly, a holding place for blown double agents who had been discovered in the country, being as it was home to the agency’s team of interrogators.

Like all other recruits, it was at the House that Belle had received most of her training under Granny’s watchful eye. The older woman had not spent much time as an active field agent herself before retreating to the House’s sturdy walls, preferring to nurture and protect the agents under her care than go out and actively fight against threats. She was as tough as they came, but she cared about every single person who came under her roof, and she never forgot a face. When Belle had graduated from the House and was given her first assignment as a probationary agent, Granny had smiled and said that she hoped never to have to see her at there again, unless it was for a social call or a quick debrief after a successful stint as a resident agent overseas. Belle wondered how Granny must have felt to have Gold in her care again after he had been repatriated, since she had trained him and no doubt told him the exact same thing as she had said to Belle.

Granny’s granddaughter, Ruby, now oversaw the House, following in her grandmother’s footsteps after a short but successful period as a field agent, but she had not been able to help them. All the files relating to Gold’s repatriation were locked down tight and it was rare for the agency to keep tabs on ex-agents for any length of time after they’d passed their final vetting and were no longer considered a potential security threat. Gold had been monitored for longer than some other ex-agents, having spent so much time with only Avalon intelligence agents and criminal masterminds for company there had been a fear that he might have been turned, but he was given the all clear a few years after leaving the agency and he had promptly vanished.

Ruby had suggested that they talked to Granny, as she had personally overseen Gold’s repatriation, and she might have more of an idea as to where he might go. If there was one thing that all agents knew how to do, it was disappear and adopt a new identity and life as easily as breathing. Becoming someone else was second nature to them, and Belle had no doubt in her mind that Gold had been several different people since leaving the agency.

Granny, although advancing in years now, was a down to earth soul, still as practical and forthright as Belle remembered from her own time at the House. The woman was a tour de force, and Belle received the distinct impression during their short meeting that she had not retired willingly.

Even Granny, stoic, dependable Granny, had been saddened by the mention of Gold’s name, and even more so by the circumstances that Belle now found herself in.

_“He won’t come back,” she said plainly. “Not for you, not for anyone, and certainly not for Blue.” She sighed. “I was there when they got him back. I always went to swap-overs, I wanted to make sure I got my hands on the poor souls before the interrogators could. When you get back someone who’s been in prison, especially for as long as he was, you know they’ve been interrogated to within an inch of their sanity, and all Top Brass want to do is send them straight in for more interrogation. They need time to readjust and come back to themselves. What they’ve been through, it strips away their dignity and humanity. They need the chance to regain some of that before they speak to their peers.” Granny paused and sighed. “In all my days before or since I’d never seen anything like it. He was thin as a rake and scruffier than a stray mongrel. Whatever they’d been doing to him, it had done a number on his ankle and he could barely walk; they dragged him over to us. But despite it all he was still so defiant, so snarling, like a cornered animal. And that gave me hope. Sometimes when you get people back they’ve lost the fight they had at the start. They’ve resigned themselves to their fate. But I knew that whatever had happened to Gold, his spirit was not completely broken. There was still a shred of fight left in him and there was still a shred of hope that we could get back some trace of the man he’d been before.”_

_Finally she smiled. “He didn’t speak all the way back to the House. He made a point of ignoring Blue and in the end she gave up trying to be polite and ignored him too. We stopped for food on the way and he ate like he hadn’t seen food in six years. Fifteen minutes later he threw up over Blue’s shoes. I knew it would happen but I didn’t say anything. She deserved it, self-serving cow.”_

_Granny’s detestation of Blue was a welcome and refreshing change from the agency, where no-one would dare to cross her. Now that she was retired, Granny felt no qualms in openly hating Belle’s section chief. After reading the Foresight case file, Belle could not say that she blamed the older woman._

_“He was so angry, and he had every right to be. He wouldn’t tell us anything about what had happened to him. But I know where he’ll have gone. People gravitate towards home, they always do. He said to me that the thing he’d missed most whilst he was out there was the Scottish sea breeze. You might want to start your search in Lochdubh. It’s where he grew up, so he feels safe there, and it’s a small, close-knit community, easy to hide in plain sight. If a stranger comes in asking for you, you can bet that word will get round faster than wildfire and folks will band together to give you plenty of time to escape, no questions asked.”_

Belle leaned her head back against the passenger headrest. After the meeting with Granny, inquiries had been made and Gold had been run to ground, keeping himself to himself and running an antique shop in a tiny town on the Scottish coast, and that was where Belle and Emma were headed towards.

“Remind me, if we see any people playing bagpipes in kilts, I need to pull over and take a picture for Henry,” Emma said. “He doesn’t believe that Scottish people actually do that so he made me promise as soon as he found out I was coming to Scotland today.”

Belle smiled. Emma’s ten-year-old son was a sweet boy, and although Emma loved her job and wouldn’t change it for the world, Belle knew that there were times when she worried what would happen to Henry if something were to happen to her out in the field. She had comfort from Neal, of course, good old dependable Neal who would always despair of Emma’s line of work, knowing that she was more than just a pen-pusher in the foreign office like she claimed, but he would never tell her to give up on her passion. For a few moments, Belle wondered what it would be like to have a child or significant other who worried about her when she went off on assignment. But then again, perhaps it was the family waiting for her at home that kept Emma going, made her more determined than everyone else to get back in one piece to see her partner and her child again.

“We’re nearly there,” Belle mused, watching as the mile numbers on the signposts counted down towards their destination. “I can see why they gave us a Land Rover for a hire car.”

Emma laughed. “Yeah, I don’t think my little yellow bug could survive these roads.” There was a pause, not uncomfortable, for a long moment as they rumbled along the narrow, bumpy lane. “Have you looked at that file that Blue gave you?”

Belle shook her head. “I didn’t think it prudent.”

She glanced down at her handbag, where a manila file was nestled snugly and sealed with confidential tape. Even if there was a way to get into it without obviously breaking the tape, she wouldn’t have done it. Blue had given her the file when Belle had gone into her office to report that they had found Gold and were going to go and see him. It was leverage, the older woman had said, something to help persuade him to come with them.

“Blackmail material?” Belle had asked, straight up.

Blue had simply pursed her lips and told Belle to be on her way.

“I’m not sure about this,” she said to Emma presently as they came over the crest of a hill and dropped down into the tiny town beyond. “I don’t think it’s right.”

“What, blackmail?” Emma shrugged. “We do it to get people to do what we want all the time, Belle. I don’t see what makes this time any different.”

“Yes, but Gold’s one of our own.” Belle sighed. “It feels wrong to be using our own methods against our own colleagues, or former colleagues.”

“Don’t think of him as a former colleague?” Emma suggested. “He was never technically a colleague of ours to start with. He’s just another mark whose help we require.” She pulled up outside a shop at one end of the high street. _Mr Gold, Pawnbroker and Antiquities Dealer_. “We’re here. And not a kilt-wearing bagpipe player in sight.”

Belle looked up at the exterior of the shop. It seemed rather dark and foreboding inside, although the sign in the door said that it was open. It was a place to hide in, filled with treasures from a bygone age. Belle wondered how much of the stuff was there as a defence. All agents were cautious people who left little to chance and she doubted that the paranoia lifted after they left the service. If anything, she suspected that it became more intense.

“Well, there’s no use sitting out here in the car getting cold and steaming up the windows,” Emma said, her tone of voice practical and no-nonsense. “People will start to think that we’re getting up to no good. Come on. With any luck he’ll be only too happy to help us out and you won’t have to resort to your rather dubious leverage.” Belle just quirked an eyebrow at her and Emma shrugged. “Worth a shot.”

Belle was glad she had chosen Emma as her backup on this assignment. They had run point for each other on various occasions before and Belle enjoyed Emma’s company as well as her down to earth demeanour and common sense. Emma was the kind of person to call a spade a spade, and she was more than willing to use one, either to smack you round the head or to help you bury a dead body. More likely the latter.

By mutual agreement they left the car and entered the shop, the old-fashioned bell above the door jangling loudly to announce their presence. The shop was empty apart from the man at the counter, who made no motion of having noticed his having company. Belle took a moment to glance around the shop, scoping it. It was full of junk, but there was a certain artistry in the mess; it was carefully choreographed so that a stranger would be lost but the owner would know exactly where everything was. She turned her attention back to the man behind the counter.

“Mr Gold?” she began.

The man standing at the counter did not look up from his accounts book.

“Are you here to kill me?” he asked.

The question caught Belle completely off her guard.

“No. We’d just like to talk to you.”

“Your car’s got government plates and you’re wearing standard issue side-arms. I’ve been around enough to be able to spot a concealed pistol.” He finally looked up at them. “You’ll forgive my wariness, I’m sure.”

He looked a lot older than the picture in the case file, but that was understandable. It was two decades ago, after all. Nonetheless, he appeared to have aged with more than just the passage of time. His face seemed worn down by hardship, pain and misfortune, making him seem older than his years. Belle could not say that she was wholly surprised given his past. Still, she could see the handsome young man that he had been etched into his features, and perhaps, if he smiled, that man would return.

“So what would you like to talk about?” Gold asked.

“It’s rather a delicate matter,” Emma said. “May we speak privately?”

Gold gestured around the shop with one hand. “There’s no-one else in the shop, dearie. Any more private than that and I’d have a local scandal on my hands, and that would never do.”

“Could you at least close the shop for a few minutes?” Belle asked.

Gold pointed to the door.

“I trust you know how to switch a sign from open to closed.”

Belle sighed and went over to shut the shop before returning to Gold at the counter.

“Now, could you please stop pointing that gun at my colleague’s kneecap and we’ll have a sensible discussion?”

Gold brought the gun up from below the counter with obvious reluctance, flicking the safety on and putting it down on the desk.

“What did you want to discuss?” he asked icily.

“I thought service weapons had to be handed in when you left the agency,” Emma mused, looking at the pistol on the counter.

“They do,” Gold growled. “My patience is not infinite, ladies.”

“We need your help,” Belle said. “For an assignment of a rather delicate nature.”

Gold snorted. “ _You_ want _my_ help.”

“Yes,” Belle replied, trying to keep her voice level.

Gold raised an eyebrow, leaning both hands on the counter heavily. It was a hard pose, a challenging one.

“I presume that you are aware of what happened all those years.”

Belle gave a slow nod. “We have read the case file, yes.”

“You are aware, then, that I’m a cripple?” He held up the gold-handled cane that was hooked over the counter. “You’re aware that I’ve lost the most powerful asset any agent ever has?”

It could not be denied – unable to walk without a cane, he would always have a distinguishing feature that would mark him out to someone tailing him. He was unable to vanish.

“So what could you possibly need my help to do?”

“We need you to extract an asset,” Emma said. “We have had an offer of information in return for defection.”

Gold quirked an eyebrow and hooked the cane back where it had been before, resuming his previous position. Belle glanced sideways at her colleague; she could see her hand twitching at her right hip, ready to slip beneath her coat and draw her weapon at a moment’s notice. They had been prepared for Gold to be hostile – they had expected it. But there was something in his voice when he spoke in such cool, measured tones that was downright dangerous.

“And where, pray tell, would I be extracting this asset from?” he asked, his voice silky smooth through gritted teeth. “Because I think I know what you’re going to say, and I don’t think I’m going to like it.”

“Avalon.”

“Don’t you just love it when you’re right?” Gold’s tone was almost conversational. “You’ve read the file, Agent…”

“Swan. Emma Swan.”

Gold turned his head towards Belle, head inclined to question.

“Belle French.”

“You’ve read the file, Agent Swan, Agent French. You know what happened the last time I went to extract an asset from Avalon.”

“You were blown,” Belle conceded.

“Ah yes, there it is, that wonderful word. Blown. An agent was blown. The agency lost an agent. What did I lose, Agent French? I lost six years of my life! I lost my freedom, I lost my identity, I lost my home, I lost my son, I lost the ability to walk unaided, I lost my basic human rights! I lost every last shred of dignity that I possessed!”

His soft, dangerous voice had become louder in his passionate tirade, until he was just shy of shouting at them.

“That’s what happened the last time I helped the agency,” Gold snapped. “And what did the agency do to help me? Nothing. They let me rot in a stinking windowless box for six years. I gave the agency everything, and what did I get back? Six years of imprisonment. Torture. Humiliation and degradation. So tell me, Agent French.” He leaned in closer over the counter, teeth bared in a snarl. “Why would I ever, ever want to help you?”

“Because you’re the only person that the asset trusts,” Belle said calmly. She was not going to be scared by this man, because she could see that everything he was saying stemmed not from anger, but fear. He had experienced terrible trauma, and they were asking him to return to the place where it had happened. It was like asking a victim to shake hands with their abuser, and Belle hated herself for doing it. But emotions had to be put aside in their line of work, as callous as it sounded. This was a matter of life and death, a matter of international security.

Gold had gone very quiet. He was still leaning heavily on the counter, and he had been staring down at the polished wood for several minutes before he spoke again.

“It’s Regina, isn’t it?” he said softly. “You want me to extract Regina.”

He looked up and looked them both dead in the eye, first Emma and then Belle. His stare was piercing and so cold; for a man with such warm brown eyes it felt like they were boring shards of ice into her soul.

“Get out of my shop,” he hissed. “And tell Fae Blue to find herself another lackey. I won’t fall for the same trick twice. If she wants Regina so badly, she can go and get her herself. Let’s see how she fairs in an Avalonian maximum security prison.”

Belle sighed, and with a twinge of guilt that she tamped down hard, took the file out of her bag and placed it on the counter.

“Blue said that this might change your mind.”

Gold looked down at the conspicuous file, eyeing it warily, as if it was going to burn him if he touched it. Finally, he snatched it up and tore open the confidential tape, and his eyes quickly scanned the text inside.

Belle saw the moment he changed. His entire stance sagged a little from his hard, defensive posture, and his hand went to the cane handle hooked over the counter-top, leaning on it heavily as he read. The colour drained from his already pale face.

“Well, this changes things,” he muttered.

“So you’ll come with us?” Emma asked, making a valiant effort to hide the note of hope in her voice.

“I never said that, dearie. I said it changes things. I never said that it had changed my mind. I’ll be in touch twenty-four hours from now when I’ve made my decision. Run along now. Your car’s parked on double yellows and the local bobby’s been bored recently. Turn the sign back to open on your way out.”

The conversation was very obviously closed. There was no use in flogging a dead horse. Gold had said that he would contact them, and all they could do was hope that he kept his word. There were channels that ex-agents could use to get back in touch with the agency – the location of the House and HQ were no secret to anyone who had ever spent time there, for a start.

“Goodbye, Mr Gold,” Belle said. “Thank you for your time.”

He didn’t respond; didn’t make any motion to acknowledge the fact that he had been spoken to at all. He just kept staring down at the file in his hand.

As they left the shop, Belle thought she heard him mutter to himself.

_“Gold, you goddamn fool.”_

“Do you think we were successful?” Emma asked, checking the Land Rover for wheel clamps and parking tickets.

“I honestly have no idea. Whatever was in that file really knocked him for six though.”

Belle got into the car beside Emma, who turned the heating on full blast against the highland chill that had settled into the vehicle.

“What do you think it was?” Emma pondered.

Belle shrugged. Part of her wanted to know, but the other part just wanted to leave well alone. All they had to do was wait and see.


	3. Chapter 3

It was coming up for the twenty-four hour mark with no contact from Gold, and Belle was beginning to lose faith. Perhaps his sense of self-preservation had won out over whatever emotion had gripped him in the shop when he had read the file. Still, it was not as if she had nothing to do except wait for his call; she had been kept busy talking to Agent Mallory at the Avalon residency and arranging things for their visit, including several contingency plans for their contingency plans, but every so often Belle could not help but stare at the phone on her desk, willing it to ring and for her to hear soft, dangerous Scottish tones on the other end when she answered. How she expected him to know her direct extension was anyone’s guess, but Belle had received the distinct impression that Gold could do anything if he put his mind to it.

She had not been expecting the shrill bark of Blue’s office phone heralding an internal call to be the sound that immediately put her on alert, but it was. Blue snatched up the receiver without looking away from her computer screen.

“This is Blue.”

Outside Blue’s office, Belle could not hear the person on the other end of the call but she could see her superior’s reaction. If she’d been taking a sip of her tea at the time, she would have choked on it. As it was, she stopped with the cup halfway to her mouth and her jaw hanging open in a manner remarkably reminiscent of a startled fish.

Presently she caught Belle staring at her through her office door and she closed her mouth and put her cup down.

“Right,” she said briskly to the person on the other end. “Usual procedure then. Put him in room four.” There was a pause whilst the caller spoke, and Blue gave an exasperated sigh, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Yes, I know he’s not going to like it, but we have very little choice. There are security protocols to be followed and he’s broken about six already. I’ll be there in a minute.”

She put the phone down and stayed staring at it for a few moments. She appeared to be visibly steeling herself up. There was a look of hastily hidden trepidation in her usually calm face, but it was gone in a second, and she came to the office door, beckoning Belle inside.

“Get your files,” the older woman said. “Gold’s here.”

Belle couldn’t help but give a small smile. He had come through in the end, and in a most unexpected manner. She had to say, she was quite pleased with the way that his appearance had completely thrown Blue for a curve. Belle left the room with Blue following and grabbed her files off her desk, giving Emma a thumbs up on the way past.

Blue did not speak at all during their journey from her office to the secure room that they had put Gold in. Belle wondered if he had simply walked into HQ and demanded to speak to Blue. She wouldn’t put it past him. She wouldn’t put anything past him. Belle cast a glance askance at Blue. She seemed to be her normal self apart from the pursed lips. There was evidently no love lost between her and Gold and for an idle moment Belle wondered if they’d met since that fateful night when he had been returned from Avalon and had projectile vomited over her shoes.

They reached room four and entered.

“Well, if it isn’t the Blue Fairy. Agent French,” Gold added respectfully before turning his attention back to Blue. His eyes were narrowed, his expression hard and challenging. This meeting was going to be fascinating to observe. Morbidly so.

“I must say, interrogation’s a bit more upmarket than it was when I was last here, Blue.” Gold looked around the small room, pointedly staring into the mirror on the wall behind Belle that she knew to be a two-way. “You’ve put pot-plants in here and everything.”

“This isn’t interrogation, this is simply a secure room,” Blue said. Her teeth were gritted.

“Hmm. Keep telling yourself that.” Gold leaned forward on the desk. “So, Blue. You need me. What are you prepared to do to get me back?”

“What do you want?” Blue asked. “Treasury has already signed off on a substantial payment for you, as you’ll know from the file.”

“I know, and I am very grateful for their generosity considering the risk I am taking in returning to a country where half the population wants to kill me. You know what I want, Blue.”

Blue frowned. “And you know that it is not possible.”

“That I do, sadly.” Whoever had brought Gold in here had given him a cup of tea and one of the sugar sachets had split open, a fine trailing of white crystals spilling over the table. Gold was doodling abstract patterns in them. “I thought I ought to remind you nonetheless.”

“Gold, do you think I don’t think about it?” Blue’s voice had become softer, pleading almost. “We had to do it, for the greater good.”

“No, you didn’t. You had so many options open to you. You did not have to take that one. And yes, Fae, I do think that you don’t think about it. I think you haven’t thought about it since the moment you did it.” His dark eyes alighted on Belle and he tailed off, as if he had forgotten that she was in the room with them and this wasn’t their private argument, dragging up grudges that were at least fourteen years old. “But let’s leave that for another time,” he said gruffly. “When there are no other ears present.”

Belle would not have got very far in her line of work had she not been able to read people minutely, but she was certain that one didn’t need training to be able to see the hatred that Gold was directing towards Blue. The emotion was almost palpable; it was remarkable. But as he closed the conversation and changed the subject, so his demeanour visibly changed. Whatever Blue had done those years before, whatever it was that had caused him to hate her so much – because the feeling was not mutual, however much Blue disliked Gold it was not the same active, burning hatred that he felt for her – he could put it to one side and let it simmer undisturbed whilst more important matters were dealt with. He pressed his fingertips together. There was absolutely no mistaking the balance of power in the room.

“I will help you, Blue, but you knew that I would as soon as you gave that file to Agent French. I’ll credit you with one thing, you always know exactly how to hit just where it hurts. I wonder the interrogators didn’t try and recruit you for their team, I’m sure you’d be an asset. Yes, you knew I would co-operate, but I do, however, come with conditions.”

“And what are your conditions?” Blue asked coolly.

“They will not take me alive,” Gold growled. He jabbed his slim index finger against the table to emphasise his point. “If you won’t give me a suicide pill I’ll bloody well source my own. You already made damn sure I’ve got nothing worth staying alive for back home and I will not go through any of that again, Blue. Not for Regina, not for anyone, and certainly not for you.”

Blue nodded slowly. “I understand. Anything else?”

“Yes.” Gold did not expand upon his point.

Blue took a deep breath. “What is it?” she asked. Belle could already sense the defeat in her voice. They needed Gold, needed him badly, and they would have to accept whatever demands he made of them. It was almost like dealing with defectors. I want this this, or I am not helping you. With defectors, one always ran the risk of providing their demands and then their information not being up to scratch, their end of the bargain unfulfilled. At least that risk was somewhat diminished with Gold. Belle knew, from his reaction at the pawn shop, that if he came back to them he would go through with the assignment. There had been something in his manner that had made him seem almost resigned to the inevitable.

“I know what you want me to do, Blue, and I will not do it. If I come back and I do this extraction, then I do it my way. I know your MO, Blue, because I’m not kidding myself into thinking that you’ve changed in the last twenty years. I know you want me to turn Regina. You want me to bleed her dry and then turn her round and send her back for more. I will not. She wants to defect. I will give her what she wants. I will bring her over here and debrief her and get every last scrap of information I can from her, and then I will set her up in a nice little remote corner of Scotland where no-one will ever find her. But I will not use and abuse her and then send her back to her poisonous mother to risk her life for us.”

Blue didn’t say anything but her expression said it all. Belle felt a jolt of something unpleasant in her stomach. She had not known that this was Blue’s plan. There had been no mention of turning Regina into a double agent for them, only assessing her information and organising her extraction. Blue had not mentioned turning her to work for them and spy in Cora’s personal affairs where they could not.

At length Blue spoke. “I would ask you to reconsider but I know that it would be futile. You were always stubborn, Gold, and I am not kidding myself into thinking that you’ve changed, either.”

“She’s only twenty, Blue. She’s scared and desperate and she’s coming to us for help out of her desperate situation. She’s offering us treasure because she knows we’re the only people who can protect her and she knows it’s the only thing we trade in. She knows we can make her vanish and she knows that all magic comes at a price. How do you think she’ll feel when we take her treasure, horde it like the old dragons we are and then say ‘sorry princess, it wasn’t enough, go back and get some more’. Because we all know, and she’ll know, that no matter how much she gives us, it will never be enough and we will always send her back into the lion’s den for more.”

“You’ve always been too sentimental for this job,” Blue muttered.

“She’s twenty,” Gold repeated firmly. “She has her entire life ahead of her and I will not break her spirit like that. I’m fifty-six, I’m lame, and I can accept a suicide mission like this one. But I won’t have her broken so young.”

His face was unemotional but deep in his dark eyes, Belle saw a flicker of something else. Sorrow, perhaps? Or maybe a fierce sense of protection. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand, you’ve never watched you own child grow up like I did my son. You lost your own innocence long ago and you’ve never seen innocence like it since.”

Blue nodded. “All right. We’ll do it your way. But she’s only got one chance to deliver. You’ll need to scrutinise everything that she gives you.”

Belle knew what Blue was driving at, and her mind returned to her previous train of thought about defectors. There was always the possibility that Regina had offered them intelligence in order to secure a future safe from her mother, but once she had that safe future, she would not give them any more. Mal’s network of assets in Avalon had picked up some preliminary samples from her to verify their genuineness and usefulness and the snippets that they had received had been, for want of a better word, gold dust. If Regina had more information like that, it would bring them several steps closer to shutting down Cora Mills completely.

Belle had to say one thing for the girl: she was canny. She knew how to play the game, possibly because her mother had played it so well back in the day. She had sent the intelligence with the message ‘you get half now, Gold gets the other half later’ and she had literally done just that, neatly tearing off all her photocopies halfway down the page.

Somewhere deep in the back of her mind, Belle was still convinced that it was all a trap, and the information that Regina had provided was only adding more and more bait to a trap that was getting ever bigger.

Blue opened one of her files and withdrew a sheaf of papers. “You can’t know anything more about the assignment until you sign,” she said. “Once you sign, you can’t walk away.”

Well, he could, theoretically, but he would be a fugitive, hunted down and locked up in the House until the assignment was concluded. Blue knew that Gold had no intention of spending any more time than he absolutely had to behind locked doors. He pulled the papers towards him and began to read the terms of his employment carefully.

“We’ll need your full biometrics for ID and you’ll need a medical,” Blue continued.

Gold held up his cane, which had been resting against the table, not looking up from the papers. “You really think I’ll pass a House medical, Blue? I can barely walk, let alone run. Besides, we’ve already established that you need me. You’re hardly going to turn around and say ‘sorry but no’ when it turns out I’ve gained two and a half stone since my last medical, are you? I’m not a new recruit, Blue, I’m an old hand.” He looked up at them at last. “My body might have gone to the proverbial dogs, but my mind’s as sharp as it ever was. If I was good back in the day, I’m better now.”

Somehow, Belle did not doubt that. She also did not doubt that he was still a lot physically stronger than he made himself out to be. His build was small but far from scrawny, more wiry, like a coiled spring just waiting to be unleashed. He turned his attention back to the paperwork in front of him, continuing to read, and the room fell into an oppressive, uncomfortable silence. The ticking of the clock on the wall above them seemed far too loud all of a sudden, and Belle found herself wishing for it to just stop.

Finally Gold took a pen out of his inside jacket pocket, and, with slow deliberation, scrawled his name before handing the document back to Blue.

“I am at your service once more, Fae. Enjoy the feeling whilst it lasts.”

Blue didn’t respond.

“I’ll get this down to technical,” she said eventually. “Someone will let you know when they’re ready for you. In the meantime, Agent French will bring you up to speed. Needless to say, all of your existing identities are long since blow; you’ll both need to create a brand new legend. Avalonian security isn’t advanced enough yet to pick you up on entry; they didn’t have the necessary resources at the time you were imprisoned, but they will be onto you soon enough. Your identities must be watertight.”

There was a pause whilst Gold and Blue continued to stare at each other.

“Thank you,” Blue muttered finally, before leaving the room without another word. As soon as she had gone, Gold relaxed, if only minutely.

“So, Agent French, it appears that you are to be my companion on this little excursion into hostile territory. His eyes flickered towards her file. “So, read me in. What’s our cover?”

“Diamonds,” Belle said. She passed him a couple of sheets of Regina’s intel and Mal’s reports. “Regina’s twentieth birthday present from her mother, along with an engagement ring via Leo White, was a very small part of the firm dealing with high-end bespoke jewellers all around the world, selling diamonds. It’s about the only part of the business that’s completely legitimate. We’ve been keeping tabs on it for a while but it’s never given us any reason for suspicion.”

Gold nodded. “A pretty little decoration to maintain the façade of respectability,” he agreed dryly. “Much like the diamonds themselves. Valuable in its own right but the first thing to be cut loose in times of crisis.” He continued to skim the intel and smiled when he got to Regina’s cut off. “Good girl,” he muttered. “Well, you did learn from the best, I suppose.” He finished his brief perusal and looked up at Belle. “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, or so they say. How beautifully ironic. So, diamonds are our cover. How exactly are we getting into the country?”

“Regina’s department deals mainly with recruiting new customers – we’re certain that Cora uses it as a screening process for potential new associates but like I said, no suspicious activities in and of itself just yet. Our cover would be as potential new customers; a small, independent luxury boutique going for quality over quantity and looking to source the most brilliant diamonds in the world.”

“And of course, Cora Mills is the Queen of Diamonds.” Gold leaned back in his chair, his dark eyes still unfathomable. Belle wished that she could get a read on him, but it was impossible. She’d been trained for years in how to detect the smallest tells, it was a necessary part of her job, but Gold had received the same training and knew equally well how to cover his emotional tracks and guard his thoughts.

“Have you had any thoughts as to a cover identity yet?” he asked.

Belle shook her head. “No, I was waiting for you to sign on before I started going into details. I’ve always found that it’s easier to create characters together if I’m working in tandem with someone, since everything has to match up perfectly.”

“Sensible,” Gold said, nodding his appreciation of her methods before asking: “Is anyone else coming on this operation?”

“Emma will be coming separately; she has an Avalonian identity that’s still running that she’s been using in this country to get close to possible Avalon agents. She’ll be working with the residency as a go between and doing leg work.”

Gold was silent for a long time.

“Who heads up the Avalon residency now?” he asked.

“Agent Mallory,” Belle replied. Gold made no response and she ventured to speak again. “She was one of your contemporaries, wasn’t she? I remember seeing her name once or twice in the _Foresight_ file.”

“Yes, Mal and I were at the House together. She was going to be my backup on _Foresight_ until Control said it had to be a solo assignment due to its nature. To avoid suspicion.” He paused. “It’ll be nice to see her again.”

He didn’t say more than that; his carefully erected mental walls were staying strong in the face of what might have been an intrusion. Belle wondered what would have happened had _Foresight_ not failed and if Gold had completed his assignment and gone on to become the Avalon resident agent. She wondered what would have happened if Agent Mallory had gone along on his assignment as well: would they have lost two agents to the cold and concrete of Avalonian prison, or would things have turned out slightly differently?

She decided that it would not be a good idea to pursue that train of thought and she changed the subject, getting on with the task at hand.

“New legends,” she said briskly. “Time for yet another new identity. I’m already running four.” Gold gave a snort of laughter. “The quicker we can do this, the better; the documents team will want all the information as soon as possible.”

“I take it that they’re just as irritable and hard to please as they always were,” Gold said.

It was Belle’s turn to laugh. The documents team, in charge of forgery and creating all the fake documents required to substantiate a false identity, were notorious throughout the agency as the most demanding and bureaucratic department. Belle wondered that Blue hadn’t taken up a position with them.

“Let’s get started,” she said. “We’re business partners…”

“No,” Gold interrupted. “Married.”

“Pardon?” Belle looked up.

“Much easier to defend and much easier to keep up,” Gold said. “If you’re married you can share a hotel room, you can do anything you want in there without raising suspicion from the constant migration between rooms. You can fake a much more convincing argument between spouses than between business partners should the need arise. You can play the poorly-done-to wife and go and hang off someone’s arm in the bar to get their keys.”

Belle nodded. The logic was sound. She didn’t have a problem with it if Gold didn’t; the main difficulty that Belle had always foreseen with pretending to be married came with learning enough about each other to make the marriage convincing.

She was not quite sure how long they spent creating the new identities before her phone rang. It was something of a challenge, trying to create someone who could be as ordinary and forgettable as possible, without forgetting any of the details herself. Most of their fake lives drew on details from their real lives, to make things easier to remember. Same age, same birthdays, wedding anniversary was the date they first met – the previous day in the pawn shop – and various other little details that seemed commonplace but were necessary to make the act a success.

She answered her phone.

“This is French.”

It was the technical department; they were ready to get Gold set up on the security system again, and Belle led the way through the labyrinth of corridors down into the more confidential areas of the building.

“It is interrogation,” Gold remarked as they left the room. “I don’t know who Blue’s trying to kid.”

He didn’t speak again until they reached the technical operations office and Belle ushered him inside. She stood in one corner, watching as the technicians took fingerprints and eye scans, and she looked over the notes that she had made.

Pretending to be married. Belle had done a lot of pretending in her time as an intelligence agent but she had never pretended to be married before. Perhaps that was because the majority of her assignments were solo or had Emma as her backup. She was about to go to Avalon with a man she’d met only the previous day, and she had to give the impression that she was in love with him and had lived with him for years. They were going to have to spend a lot of time getting to know each other in order for it to be convincing to the sharp-eyed authorities who would be getting suspicious of them.

Somehow, though, the thought did not put Belle off at all.


	4. Chapter 4

It took a while for the technical team to finish getting everything they needed from Gold, and by the time they were done, the building was winding down to a close for the day. Belle said her goodbyes to Gold, leaving him in the technical department and expecting to see him in the office the next morning. Now that he was back on the security system he could come and go as he pleased and didn’t require an escort.

Emma was still in the office when Belle got back to her desk; her lamp was the solitary illumination in the room.

“You’re here late,” Belle remarked, gathering up her things.

“Neal and Henry have taken themselves to the cinema; I’m meeting them for pizza later. I thought I’d make good use of the overtime to get ahead with my reports, but I got side-tracked.” Emma held up the _Foresight_ file and sighed. “What if it _is_ just another trap, Belle? What if Gold gets captured again?”

_He’ll kill himself,_ Belle thought darkly, remembering the earlier conversation with Blue. But there was something altogether more chilling about the thought, because this time round, it would not just be Gold who would be captured. In all likelihood, Belle would be as well. She gave an involuntary shiver at the notion. It was horrible to think of the things that Gold had been subjected to, but to think of them happening to her… She pushed the creeping fears aside and focussed on the present and Emma.

“I think it will be all right,” she said. “I don’t believe it’s another trap. I think Cora’s too clever for that. She wouldn’t use the same method twice. She rarely does, that’s why it’s been so hard to pin her down to anything. She’s clever, and she’s careful, and she’s pretty paranoid. She’s evaded us for this long, she wouldn’t take the risk of plying us with this baited trap when she knows what happened last time. She knows that we know what happened last time. She wouldn’t take the risk of us not taking her bait, because she’d know that after that, we’d be very wary of anything coming out of Avalon and she’d be worse off than before. No, I think that if Cora were trying to lure us into a trap, there’s no way that she’d be as overt about it as this. There’s absolutely nothing secretive about Regina’s request to meet Gold and I don’t think Cora would be so blatant, it goes against her MO. She’s always been discreet for as long as we’ve been keeping tabs on her. This is too obvious for her.”

Emma made a face. “I just hope you’re right, Belle.”

“So do I.” Belle snorted. The thought that this was far too obvious for Cora was the only thing that kept her from throwing her papers down on Blue’s desk and walking out, citing the operation as being too dangerous. Sometimes you had to risk a lot to win a lot, and Cora Mills would be their biggest win in recent history. They’d been trying to get at her for twenty years now, and this was the first possible opportunity they’d had. They couldn’t afford to wait another twenty years for another one, not with Regina’s marriage just around the corner and the possibility of Cora getting her hands on Leo White’s business.

“So how did things go with Gold?” Emma asked, pointedly changing the subject. “Whatever happened, Blue was in an absolutely foul mood for the rest of the afternoon. It was really quite amusing to watch. I thought she was actually going to explode at one point.”

Belle had to stifle a laugh at the image and she looked over at Blue’s office door.

“He hates her,” she said simply. “It’s more than hatred, in fact. It’s something deeper than hate; it’s crystallised into something hard and dangerous.”

“There’s definitely something that Blue’s not telling us,” Emma added, picking up the _Foresight_ file and waving it at Belle. “Considering it’s been declassified, I can’t help but feel that there’s something missing. It doesn’t feel like a complete report. I suppose most of the details relating to the repatriation are locked up at the House, but I still don’t see why there wouldn’t be any mention of it in the case file. Something’s missing. Something she doesn’t want us to know about. There is one thing that intrigues me though. If you read through the timelines, I reckon that they could have got Gold back two years earlier than they did. It’s just a hunch, but maybe that’s the reason Gold hates Blue so much? He could have come home earlier and she stopped it for some reason?”

Belle shrugged. If that was true, was it any wonder that Gold hated Blue in the way he did? But something in the back of her mind refused to relinquish her.

_You already made damn sure I’ve got nothing worth staying alive for._

Somehow she thought that it went far deeper than the length of his imprisonment.

“Do you think he’ll be ok?” Emma asked.

Belle nodded. “He’s a very clever man and his tradecraft is perfect despite his having been out of the field so long.”

“I don’t doubt that he’s still got what it takes,” Emma said. “I’m just worried about what happens when you get out there, to where it all began. Who knows what might trigger something? It’s a very dark place to go back to, in all senses of the words.”

“We can only wait and see.” Belle yawned and looked at her watch. “I should probably get going; it’s been an interesting day. Good luck with your reports.”

Emma grunted and turned her attention back to her paperwork. “See you tomorrow.”

“See you.”

Emma’s words struck a chord somewhere within her, and Belle’s thoughts were uneasy as she made her way out of the office and through the lonely corridors of her headquarters. It was not so much the fact that they did not have the complete picture that worried her, more the fact that Blue was deliberately hiding something from them.

Theirs was, by its very definition, a profession that was shrouded in secrecy. Secrets and lies were their main trade, so much so that these things became second nature to agents. Sometimes, lying in bed at night unable to sleep, Belle would go through all her different identities and wonder which was the real one. No-one really knew her properly. Her assets knew she was an intelligence agent, but they knew nothing of her true identity, no matter how much she talked to them to gain their trust. Her father knew her the deepest and longest, but he had no idea of the true nature of her profession. That was the price that had to be paid for the job that she did; to protect the lives of the many, so a few had to sacrifice their hopes of a normal life and live constantly in the shadows. It was a life that Belle had never minded – the reward of ensuring the security of her country was enough for her.

Yes, lies and secrecy were the very pillars of her career, but there was a very subtle difference between telling lies to the outside world and withholding information from one’s own colleagues. It was the very first thing that was whispered along the corridors at the House and at headquarters – whilst you’re in active service, trust no-one. No-one. In a world where there was so much at stake, it was very hard to stick to that mantra. Belle trusted Emma with her life, but she knew that there were secrets that Emma kept from her and things that she in her turn kept from Emma. No-one ever knew everything. It was more secure that way. All the same, it did lead, on occasions like this, to a heavy atmosphere of suspicion in the workplace. Belle knew that both she and Emma would be spending the next few days before their departure to Avalon sneaking glances at Blue’s office door, wondering what it was that she was keeping from them and whether it was important.

Belle shivered as she stepped out onto the street. The weather had definitely turned and there was a distinct autumnal chill in the air.

She had only gone a few steps in the direction of her home when a voice stopped her.

“Evening, Anabel.”

She whirled around, her hand going to the mace in her coat pocket on instinct, although she recognised the voice as Gold’s and the name as the one they had coined for their new legends. The man himself was standing in the shadows, just out of the sight of the door that led into the agency headquarters. Belle smiled.

“Have you been waiting out here for me for all this time?” she asked.

Gold shook his head. “No, I was reminiscing about the good old days with Jefferson in technical,” he said. “I just wanted to gauge your reactions; I hope you’ll forgive me, Agent French. I haven’t worked with you before and I don’t know what you’re like in the field. I wanted to see for myself now, so that I’m prepared for later.”

Belle nodded. “That’s understandable. And you can call me Belle. Or Ana. Or any one of my other myriad names.”

Gold laughed. “Likewise, you can call me Rum, or Gold, or Nicholas, or whatever else takes your fancy.”

“Would you like to go out for dinner, Rum?” It was a spur of the moment invitation, but she was working off what Gold had said about learning her working style so that he was prepared. Gold raised his eyebrows. “I mean, for rehearsal purposes,” she added hastily. “That didn’t come out in quite the way I intended. Based off your same logic; we need to get used to being around each other outside of the office so that it’s second nature when we get to Avalon. I don’t think we want anything to show us up if we can help it.”

Gold was silent for a moment then gave a small, slightly shy smile.

“All right,” he said. “It makes sense to do a practice run. It’s a date, Mrs Spinner.”

He offered her his arm and Belle slipped her own through it. “Thank you, Mr Spinner.”

They set off in the direction of the city centre. It was remarkably easy to fall into step with Gold’s uneven gait, and Belle smiled as they kept up a steady stream of unhurried, idle chatter about nothing in particular whilst they searched for a place to eat. It was not going to be hard to play at being Gold’s wife, at least, not as hard as it could have been. Presently they stopped outside a small, quiet restaurant tucked down a narrow street.

“If it’s the same as it was twenty-odd years ago then the steak is to die for, and the lobster’s not bad either." Gold held open the door. "Shall we?"

They entered and were shown to a table, Gold pulling out Belle’s chair for her. This was it, a litmus test of sorts. How naturally could they act around each other, and how much work needed to be done before they set off for Avalon?

They didn’t really speak to each other until the waiter had taken their order and left them, and even then, Belle spent a long time just looking at Gold, trying to read him. He was still closed off, still warding away intrusion, but he seemed to be an awful lot more relaxed than he’d been in the agency, or in the shop the previous day when she had first met him, on the defensive.

“Are you a cat person or a dog person?” she asked eventually. You could always tell a lot about people from their attitude to animals, she thought.

The corner of Gold’s mouth turned up in the hint of a smile and he leaned back in his chair with his wine glass.

“I’m a dog man, myself. My family’s kept border collies for years, although we’ve no sheep to herd nowadays.”

“Have you got any now?” Belle asked.

“I have two, Chip and Imp. They stay with a neighbour when I have to leave Lochdubh. They’re good girls, getting on a bit now, but still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.” He paused. “There’s no friend as loyal as a pet, Belle,” he said. “It’s something everyone in our line of work would do well to remember. A cat or dog will never sell you out, and they’re often the only one who knows everything about you.”

Belle gave a soft smile, hoping to convey her feelings without any kind of words that would sound meaningless and hollow. What could she say, anyway? I’m sorry Blue hung you out to dry for six years? She wondered at Emma’s words in the office earlier, at the parts of the _Foresight_ file that were missing. Whatever it was that Blue was anxious for them not to know, Belle now wanted to know more than ever. She pondered the possibility of being able to get it out of Gold, but quickly pushed the notion aside. Not only had he already proved himself understandably loathe to discuss _Foresight_ , it was hard to ask about something that was only noticeable for its absence. She had no idea what information she was looking for, only that she was looking for some information.

Idly she wondered about Gold’s family. That he currently lived alone with his dogs was common fact; he’d been married and divorced before his imprisonment, and had a fourteen year old son named Baden who lived predominantly with his mother. Belle thought back to Gold’s passionate words in the pawn shop yesterday. _I lost my son._ Baden Gold had vanished off the radar twenty years ago, at the time of Gold’s capture; by the time his father was back in the country he would have been an independent adult and he’d be into his thirties now. Belle had not yet had the leisure to try and work out what had happened to him; and as Blue had haughtily reminded her when Belle had mentioned him in passing, his fate was unimportant to their current assignment.

It was in that moment that everything began to fall into place. She hadn’t connected the dots before, but now it was as if a mist in front of her eyes had cleared and everything started to make a lot more sense. For the second time that evening, she thought of Gold’s snarled words to Blue. _You already made damn sure I’ve got nothing worth staying alive for._ They’d provided her clue. For a parent, what more reason to live was there than their own child? Blue had been involved in whatever it was that had happened to Bae. That was the missing link in the _Foresight_ file and that was the reason why Gold felt such an intense and palpable hatred towards her.

“Belle?”

She was pulled from her thoughts by Gold’s voice, and she realised that he’d been speaking to her and was awaiting a pertinent response.

“I was asking about your family,” he added for clarification.

“I don’t really have any to speak of,” Belle said hastily. “Only my dad and he lives in Australia so I don’t see him very much.”

“Do you miss him?”

“Sometimes.” Belle traced her finger around the rim of her wine glass, pausing whilst their food was brought to the table. “I speak to him a lot, so it’s not as if I have no contact with him at all. And we’ve lived in different countries for a long time, we’re used to it now.”

Belle knew better than to ask Gold about his own family, so they ate in silence for a while. Belle had to concede, the lobster was indeed very good. For those few minutes, whilst she tried to manhandle her spaghetti in as graceful a way as possible and Gold attacked his steak, they could have been any other couple getting to know each other on a first date. It was a shame that they couldn’t really talk shop out in the open; she felt that their conversation could have been a little less stilted if they’d been able to discuss the past escapades of mutual colleagues like Mal and Jefferson, or debate the various merits and drawbacks of their preferred sidearms. The awkward fact remained that whilst Belle knew all about Gold from his personnel files, he knew next to nothing about her.

Spearing a piece of lobster, Belle found herself thinking once more about Emma’s words. It was time to test the water. This was a trial run, after all. She needed to see how he operated just as he had tested her. So far, everything was going well, a good indicator for when they got to Avalon. But Avalon itself would be the clinch. What would happen when they were there? Belle’s first time in this volatile country, and the first time Gold had set foot there since his imprisonment.

She chewed the lobster thoughtfully, wondering the best way to approach the subject. Better to do it here, out in the open in a public forum. As heartless as it sounded, his reactions and demeanour mattered more here, where they were trying to act normally, rather than in his shop in Scotland with no-one around, or in headquarters or the House where details were already well known. It had to be here, these things had to be ironed out now. Belle spooned up her last mouthful of sauce and set her cutlery together.

“What’s the weather like in Avalon at this time of year?” she asked quietly. “I only know the climate and geography from studying it.”

“Cold.” Gold’s words were blunt, but there was no trace of discomfort in his voice at the reminder of his time in the country and the place currently being their topic of conversation. “It’s always colder than you think it’ll be. I was wearing four layers indoors as a matter of course for most of the autumn, and thermal underwear in dead winter. And it’s an oppressive kind of cold because it’s always so grey and overcast. It’s not a pretty, frosty, clear-skied cold that gives you bright eyes and rosy cheeks. It’s the kind that makes your face pale and your nose drip.”

He was looking straight at her, a slight smile in his eyes. It wasn’t an expression of happiness, however, more one of resignation and sympathy.

“I know what you’re doing, you know,” he said. “I don’t blame you. But I’m not going to break when I get out there.” He took a sip of wine before continuing, savouring it for a moment. “I know you’re wondering if I’ll get through this, but this is a brutal situation and we have to be brutal. I don’t have another choice.” He gave a snort of laughter. “You’d be amazed at what you can get through when you don’t have another choice.”

“You can pull out,” Belle said.

“And spend three weeks under surveillance in the House? No thank you. I’m sure Ruby Lucas is just as remarkable a woman as her grandmother but I’d rather be at home with my dogs and my slippers and my cocoa. Besides, I have to get Regina out. She’s the innocent party in all of this, not any of us. She’s the one we’re doing this for.”

That wasn’t strictly true, Belle thought. Their primary reason for doing what they were doing was to neutralise a threat to international security. But Gold couldn’t give two hoots about international security and the greater good. No-one needed reminding what had happened the last time he’d done something for the greater good. He needed a better reason than that for doing something, and Regina was that better reason.

“May I ask what was in the file that Blue gave me?” she asked.

“You’re perfectly at liberty to ask, but I won’t answer.”

“Is she blackmailing you?”

Gold actually laughed out loud at the suggestion. “After all I’ve seen and done in my time I’m hardly scared of blackmail. Besides, I know enough about Blue to make a few heads turn. No, no. Agent Blue just knows me very well. Like I said, she’d be an excellent inquisitor.”

They passed on dessert and Gold insisted on paying despite it having been Belle’s idea to go out to eat in the first place.

“We’re rehearsing being married,” he said with a sly grin as they left the restaurant. “Let a man treat his wife. It’ll be like this all the time in Avalon.”

“Yes, but in Avalon we have a slush fund and the agency pays for everything," Belle pointed out.

“Consider it an apology in advance for having to put up with me for the next few days."

They had reached the main street at this point, and were standing on the corner, about to go separate ways, and Belle wished that their conversation could have gone on longer. Still, she would see him again in HQ tomorrow, and there was a lot more discussing to be done to make their legends truly watertight.

“Well, good night, Belle. It’s been a pleasure making your acquaintance.”

“Likewise.”

They shook hands and went off in opposite directions; Belle towards her home and Gold towards the hotel he was staying in for the rest of the week until they went to Avalon. When she reached the end of the block, Belle cast a glance back over her shoulder, but Gold was gone, his slight frame long since vanished into the shadows, disappearing like the master agent he had been all those years ago, and now was once more.


	5. Chapter 5

There was no turning back now. The plane was about to touch down and the operation was about to commence. Belle looked across to Gold on her left. He was asleep, or at least, he had his eyes closed and hadn’t moved for the last hour, but there was nothing at all restful about his demeanour. The little frown line that had been permanently fixed between his brows for the past few days was still there, and his arms were crossed over his chest defensively. Belle let him slumber undisturbed for a little while longer; she couldn’t imagine that either of them would be getting much in the way of sleep whilst they were in Avalon. She took another glance down at her passport. Belle had always felt a certain little thrill when being issued with a new passport, a new identity to put on like a coat as and when it was needed, but she couldn’t spend too much time looking at it lest she attract suspicion. Normal people did not look at their passports all the time. In Belle’s experience, looking at any kind of identification for too long or too often was usually a marker of it being faked; the owner still getting used to it or wondering if it would stand up to scrutiny. The Avalonian airport was their first test. The assignment might be over before it had begun if they couldn’t even get into the country.

Gold woke with a start as the plane touched down, and he blinked for a moment, getting his bearings. Belle gave his arm a light, reassuring touch and smiled.

“We’re here,” she said brightly, a brightness that she did not feel inside. The taste of fear had been clinging to her tongue all day, ever since she had met up with Gold outside headquarters and David had driven them to the airport. She’d passed the point of no return, and she was undeniably nervous at the prospect of getting out of this plane and starting work.

Gold didn’t return her smile, instead choosing to stare out of the window beside him at the vast expanse of tarmac that they were taxiing down, but his hand closed over hers on his arm and gave a brief squeeze. They were married, to all intents and purposes. They had to act like it.

_“Ladies and gentlemen, we have now landed at Camelot International Airport. The local time is three twenty-six PM and the weather is overcast but dry. On behalf of myself and the cabin crew, we thank you for flying with Emirates and wish you a pleasant onward journey.”_

Gold snorted.

“All right, let’s get this show on the road,” he muttered. The steward helped get their bags out of the overhead locker and Belle followed Gold off the plane and towards passport control.

 _Act natural_ , she told herself. This wasn’t the first time that Belle had entered a country under an assumed identity, but somehow this one felt far more dangerous than all the other times that she had travelled in cover. This assignment had been planned down to the last detail, with numerous fallbacks and contingencies for contingencies, but none of that would matter if they couldn’t get past this first, unassailable barrier. There was no backup plan for Gold being recognised by security and dragged away. Belle glanced at him. His face was perfectly neutral, betraying no fear or unease save for that little frown line. She wanted to reassure him that everything was going to be all right, that it was twenty years ago and Avalon had still been picking itself up from the long shadows of its brutal war at the time, but she couldn’t guarantee anything, and she had the distinct impression that she was the one in need of reassurance more than Gold was. He was uneasy, but resigned to his fate. Belle was the one feeling definite fear, but it was a fear for her partner, not for herself.

They passed under the sign that read _Avalon Border_ and past the numerous stark signs warning against bringing contraband into the country. The airport was busy; two flights had arrived in the last few minutes and Belle had to reflect that for such a comparatively small country with comparatively few inbound flights, they really weren’t very organised. She expressed her thoughts to Gold in a low tone, and he laughed.

“Bureaucracy reigns supreme,” he whispered sideways to her. “Everything’s held up with red tape because it’s the only thing stopping the country from falling apart.”

They continued shuffling forwards in the queue, getting closer and closer to the two lone booths where a couple of bored-looking young men, barely out of their teens, were methodically stamping passports. Bored-looking was a good sign. They weren’t as likely to pick up on discrepancies as hyper-vigilant border guards would be. Still, Belle could not help but feel her heartbeat increase at the sight of the heavily armed soldiers strolling around. The military presence was the only indicator of the unsettled country that they were arriving in. Belle had always found airports to be faceless, countryless places, the same the world over with no features to distinguish them other than the language that the adverts were written in. It was hard to form a first impression of a country from its airport.

It was crunch time. Gold limped up to the control booth and pushed his passport through the slot. Documents had done well on these ones in the short space of time that they’d had, looking suitably aged for the amount of stamps that they had. Ariel, one of the veteran document wranglers, had told Belle once that it was a common failing of new forgers just starting out in the business – making a passport look both well-used and well-travelled. A pristine passport with many stamps was always going to look suspicious.

“Are you in Avalon for business or vacation?” the border guard asked in a monotone. It was a ridiculous question really, Avalon was hardly the place for a holiday.

“Business.”

“And you leave when?”

“Thursday.”

“Very good enjoy your stay. Next!” he yelled as he stamped Gold’s passport and waved him through. Belle’s brief interview went in exactly the same way and she met up with Gold just past the barriers.

“Welcome to Avalon,” was all that he said.

They had no hold luggage, so they left the airport straight away. Everything of theirs that could have proved problematic had come through with Emma the previous day and was safe at the residency with Mal.

The first thing that hit Belle, once they left the terminal building, was the cold. The temperature difference between the stuffy airport and the street outside took her breath away.

“I told you it was cold,” Gold murmured on hearing her little gasp of shock. He put an arm around her shoulders and they made their way to the taxi rank.

The airport was at the edge of the city, not too far from the main industrial areas. Avalon was such a comparatively small country that everything in it seemed to be squashed together somewhat, as if it had grand designs of being a much larger place but was hampered by its geographical area and strove to be as big as it could possibly be within its limited space, resulting in a claustrophobic, closed-in air. Gold didn’t talk during the drive; he answered the taxi driver’s questions politely but with a tone that clearly indicated his wish to be left alone, and gradually the cab fell into silence as they wove through the narrow streets of the capital. Belle continued her contemplations of the city; the flyby sightseeing giving her an excellent excuse to keep turning round to look over her shoulder, ostensibly at architecture but in truth to check if they were being followed.

Gold had not been lying when he had described the country as grey. Everything about the capital appeared to be some hue of concrete or another, and Belle gave an involuntary shiver. It deepened as they passed the grand cathedral and she saw the bullet holes in the walls, still there from the bloody clashes between the freedom fighters and the Mist Haven military. Avalon had won its independence, but at what human cost? It was obvious to Belle, now that she was here, just how deeply the country had been scarred by the war. Even without her upcoming forced marriage, Belle could quite see why Regina was so desperate to leave the place. Belle wondered what it had been like the last time that Gold had been here, when the wounds had been fresher, but she did not ask, and knew that she would not ask in the future.

They reached the hotel and Gold tipped the driver; not too much, not too little, nothing that could be remembered as out of the ordinary. The secret to being a perfect spy was always to be as forgettable as possible. People remembered unusual details – a very large tip, or none at all, or a rude customer. All these characteristics would stick. The everyday man would not.

Belle checked in; all the major reservations for the trip had been made in her legend’s name to avoid drawing attention to Gold and because she was the lead for this operation – all accountability fell to her should anything go wrong. Neither she nor Gold spoke as they entered the hotel room, but the change in demeanour was immediate; going from mild business couple to two highly professional agents as they closed the curtains and swept the room for bugs. Back at headquarters they had teams of people lovingly christened ‘ferrets’ who were specifically trained for this type of work and who would sweep through entire buildings ahead of political conferences and summits, but here Belle and Gold had only initiative and the software that Jefferson from technical support had installed on Belle’s phone the day before.

“Clear,” she announced, having gone around the room and the adjoining bathroom.

Gold nodded his agreement. “Clear.” He sank down onto the sofa with a muted groan and stretched his bad leg out in front of him.

“Are you going to be all right?” Belle asked. They still had over an hour to kill before they were due to meet up with one of the residency agents who would take them to the place that would be their headquarters for the duration of the operation, reuniting them with Emma and Mal. “I can go on my own if you want.”

Gold shook his head.

“It’s just the cold,” he grumbled, toeing off his shoe and massaging his ankle; Belle could see the outline of the pressure support under his sock. “I can feel the pins and wires in my bones.”

Belle grimaced. “I can go to the meet on my own,” she repeated.

“I’ll be fine.” Gold looked up at her and gave a macabre smile. “I think Blue’s trusting you not to take your eyes off me until we’re back on British soil. Besides, I want to see Mal again. It’s been too long.”

Belle watched him for a minute or so more until he put his shoe back on and his manner became perfectly professional again.

"Have you ever met Aurora before?" he asked. Aurora Stephens was the resident agent whom they were shortly going to meet.

Belle shook her head. "No, I've never met her. This is her first overseas stint, she only graduated from the House last year."

"Avalon for your first residency." Gold snorted. "She must have drawn the short straw."

"I don't think so." Belle took her files out of the hidden pocket in her suitcase and before going over and sitting down beside Gold on the sofa. "You're thrown in at the deep end, certainly, but you can't deny that this is a place where you're likely to see at least some of the trade in action, unlike one of the safer residencies where nothing of interest ever happens. Nowhere that's going to give you proper craft experience is ever going to be pleasant or safe. It's part of the whole career. The safer residencies go to agents who are coming to the end of their working lives who don't want too much trouble."

Belle had to think about Agent Mallory at that moment. She'd been running Avalon for as long as Belle could remember, certainly for as long as Belle herself had been with the agency, and she showed no signs of wishing to trade in her position for any other. She'd built up most of their intelligence network from scratch after Gold had been blown and his own assets had bolted in fear, and she seemed that she wanted to keep a nice close eye on things.

Gold took the papers that she offered him and began to flick through them; there was never any harm in making sure that you had your information memorised, and a reread of any important intelligence might always yield some new insight, but Belle found that she could not concentrate properly, the mixture of nervousness and anticipation eating away at her. She was never normally this restless before a meet, and theoretically there was nothing out of the ordinary about this particular meet, but she still felt much more unease than she was used to.

"Shall we get going?" Rum asked. "It might take me a little longer than usual to make the walk."

The site of their meeting was not too far from the hotel and it would have looked odd to take a taxi for such a short distance, but it was clear that Rum's leg would not be up for much running about at the moment.

Belle slipped the files into her handbag and they left the room, hanging the 'do not disturb' sign outside. Belle watched as Gold carefully folded up two wedges of paper and slid them between the door and the frame, above and below the lock. They were almost invisible unless one was looking for them, and they were an easy way to notice if the room had been entered whilst they were out of it.

The two agents made their way out of the hotel and along the streets, keeping their eyes open for anything that might be considered suspicious or out of the ordinary. In the highly delicate situation that they were in, they could not be too careful. It was not simply a case of checking that they were not being tailed. Well-trained agents did not just follow a person like an obedient dog; that was one of the easiest ways to draw attention to oneself. They would work in teams, overtaking, walking just in front and keeping pace, walking on the opposite pavement. Any Avalonian agents watching them would be local; they would know all the side streets and know where to go to be able to intercept a pair of walkers without having to track their every move. Gold's eyes were darting all around him as he walked, and Belle noticed that the hand that did not hold his cane was twitching a little, his gloved finger and thumb rubbing together in a small circular motion.

"That car's passed us twice now," he muttered, nodding at a small red Citroen that had just passed them and pulled into a parking space.

"Do you want to take a detour?" Belle asked out of the corner of her mouth.

Gold nodded and took her arm, steering her off the main street and into the pedestrianised shopping area. It would take them slightly longer to reach their destination, but they should still have plenty of time before the resident agent that they were due to meet started to panic that they had not arrived. They were supposed to meet in a coffee shop a little way from the hotel, but Rum was now taking them in the opposite direction. It was perfectly plausible that the car had passed them twice with completely benign intentions; perhaps the driver had been looking for a place to park in the busy city centre and had taken a couple of circuits before the space became available, but it was better to be safe than sorry. Belle was more than happy to let Gold take the lead and guide her through the city. She had studied the maps and tried to imprint as detailed a layout as she could into her mind, but she was never going to have the same detailed knowledge as Gold did, even twenty years after he had last lived here. For years he had relied on his wits to survive in this place and he still knew the safest places like the back of his hand.

As they walked briskly through the streets, breath curling into mist in front of them in the bitterly cold early evening air, Belle took a moment to examine her surroundings a little more closely. It was not just a sense of curiosity that fuelled her study, but also a distinct desire for self-preservation. She wanted to memorise this route that Gold was taking her lest something dreadful happen and she required a quick getaway back to the hotel. It would be no use running blindly through the streets. The day was fading now and the sunset cast an eerie light over the old buildings; they were in the centre of the city now, in the oldest quarter, and the red brick buildings seemed to glow in the dusk. Perhaps in any other place it would have looked charming or romantic and the light would have seemed warm, but not here. There was a kind of danger in the glow, each building that they passed seemed to be a beacon pointing out their whereabouts to some kind of maleficent pursuer. Even here, in the historical centre, the scars of the war were all too evident in the scorch marks and chips and holes that marred the once-elegant facades of long-abandoned homes and churches.

Belle checked her watch; they had twenty minutes before their contact would stop waiting for them and move on to their fallback meeting point. If they missed the fallback meeting as well, then they had one more chance to meet three hours later, and if that was also missed, then they had been instructed to go back to the hotel and wait till morning, by which time some more instructions for meeting up would have been posted in a drop box near the hotel.

Gold turned a corner and they ended up back on the main street opposite the cafe where they were supposed to be meeting. The light had truly gone now; Belle had been surprised how quickly it had become dark, but then again, everything about Avalon seemed to lend itself to darkness and shadows. This was a country with many skeletons in its closet and darkness was a comfortable cloak for it to wear. Everything seemed so much starker in the daylight, the visible memories were all too clear to see, but the painful reminders fell into shadows at night, much more easily hidden. In haunting blue hue of the street lamps, there was almost a sort of beauty about the city that had looked so harsh in the daylight.

They paused for a moment at the corner; Gold took out a tourist's city map and pretended to look at it under the nearest street lamp, but really this was just an opportunity for them to scout out the area for potential threats before they committed themselves to the meeting. Belle scanned the area, since nothing seemed to be amiss she took the map from Gold and glanced at it herself to allow him to look around as well.

"Looks all right," he said. "Your call."

Belle nodded. "Let's go."

They crossed the road towards the cafe. A small part of her felt a certain pride at Gold deferring to her like this; not because she had any particular thrill in being in a position of power over him but because he was ostensibly the more experienced agent despite having been out of the game for so long, and yet he trusted her to make all the judgement calls on their assignment.

Inside the building, the air was close and stuffy, and Belle looked around whilst Gold went up to the counter to order something for them. She spotted Aurora in one corner, recognising her from her file picture back at headquarters. She was for all the world absorbed in her book, but her eyes were methodically scanning the room. Presently they alighted on Belle and stopped, and Belle knew that she had been acknowledged although there was no outward sign from Aurora.

With coffee in hand, they made their way over.

Belle indicated the book in Aurora's hands. "You enjoy Goethe?"

"I prefer Lessing, but Mephistopheles always has an undeniable charm."

The coded message having been completed, Belle let herself relax a little.

"Pleased to meet you, Mr and Mrs Spinner," Aurora said in a low voice. Belle noticed that she had a flip-phone open on the table in front of her and she recognised it as one of Jefferson's toys, a simple radio signal scrambler designed to misdirect listening bugs. "I hope you had a pleasant journey here. All your parcels arrived safely yesterday."

Belle had to smile at that, their 'parcels' being Emma and some more of Jefferson's equipment that might prove necessary in Regina's extraction.

They made small talk for a little while, letting Gold drink his coffee and rest his ankle for a few minutes.

"Let's go back to the office," Aurora said eventually, before leading them out of the coffee shop and down the side street that would lead them to the residency. It was a small, nondescript building, nothing much to look at. A well-kept plaque on the wall outside read _Mirror and Lamp, jewellery valuation and insurance_.

Aurora let them into the shop and then through into the back room before locking the door behind them again.

"Welcome to the Avalon Residency."

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

The residency was a small office with four desks in it, and Belle's first immediate impression of the place was that of a room stuck in the past. It was an impression that she had received of various other buildings in Avalon, from what little she had seen of the country. The decor could have been straight out of a seventies kitchen sink drama, and it looked as if the computer equipment hadn't been updated since the mid-nineties when the residency was first established. From under the nearest desk, Emma's voice could be heard muttering along the same lines, and Belle grinned.

"It's not that bad," said the man who was sitting at the desk, untangling a bunch of wires. He was a short, stocky man, with a bald head and thick, bushy beard. "Honestly, you come over here, we welcome you into our office and give you our tea and biscuits, and the first thing you do is insult our electronics."

Emma ducked back out from under the desk, screwdriver in hand. "That's because your electronics are rubbish!" she exclaimed.

"They've never given us any trouble before," the man grumbled. "You've jinxed them."

"Oh for heaven's sake." Emma shook her head in despair before waving to Belle and Gold. "Good to see you two. I'm glad you've got here in one piece." She slid back under the table and began attacking the ancient tower unit with the screwdriver again. "I don't know how you managed to get anything done before I arrived."

The man continued to mutter before realising that he had company and should probably make an effort to be sociable to the other visiting agents.

"Agent French, Agent Gold, this is Agent Short," Aurora said. "We normally just call him Grumpy."

The man rolled his eyes. "Leroy," he corrected, shaking hands with Belle and Gold. Once the necessary pleasantries had been exchanged, he returned to his desk to continue helping, or perhaps hindering, Emma's efforts to fix his computer.

"Come on through and make yourselves at home," Aurora said, indicating the area of the room that obviously lent itself to downtime and recreation, partially separated from the rest of the office by strategically placed filing cabinets and bookcases and playing host to a very squashy-looking sofa that had evidently seen better days.

"Mal will be through in a minute, she had to send some messages,” Leroy called. “All the communication equipment is upstairs."

"I'm amazed you have broadband," Emma muttered from under the desk.

"Yes, the budget money went on fibre optic broadband and emergency callout lines and we had none left to give the place a fresh lick of paint and new curtains."

Agent Mallory, known to all as simply Mal, had entered the room. She smiled when she saw the new arrivals and came over to shake hands and welcome them to the office, but when her eyes alighted on Gold and took him in properly, it was clear to see the moment when professionalism went out of the window and she sprinted through the cramped office space and threw her arms around him.

"Christ alive, Rum, yours is a face I never thought I'd see again," she murmured. "Where the hell have you been? They told me you'd vanished off to Scotland and didn't want company so I kept my distance, but I've missed you since you've been gone."

Gold seemed slightly taken aback by the affectionate action, but then he smiled and patted Mal's back gingerly.

"It's good to see you too, Mal."

The older woman broke away at that point, sensing his unease at the close proximity.

"How are you?" she asked softly.

"Well, I'm not dead yet."

"That's always something."

The activity in the rest of the office had come to a stop by a sort of unspoken mutual consent, and even Emma had come out from under Leroy's desk to watch the reunion between the old friends. Belle had the feeling that this was a moment to be remembered and treated with the proper respect. Due to the nature of their line of work it was difficult to form lasting friendships, both within and outside of the agency, and to see a friendship that had survived despite being put on hiatus for a while gave Belle a certain sense of hope.

Presently Mal noticed everyone else's interest in the scene playing out in the middle of the room and she laughed, taking a step back before shaking Belle's hand.

"I'm sorry Belle, I shouldn't ignore you. I trust everything's gone off without a hitch so far?"

Belle laughed. "Yes, so far everything seems to be all right."

"Thank goodness for that, because I hate to inform you, but we may have come across something that might throw a spanner in the works."

Belle felt her heart sink into her boots on hearing Mal's words, and she dreaded to think what was going to happen now. She knew that everything had been too good to be true up until this point.

"Well, now that we're all here, shall we check that we're all on the same page and apprise of the latest developments?" Aurora asked. "We've been putting things in motion for a couple of weeks here and we're all anxious for something to happen. Time's ticking."

The wedding was less than a month away and Belle had seen the headline text on the society magazines in the cafe that they had met Aurora in. It told them a lot about the social climate in the country that the families of prominent business people were treated as celebrities and their nuptials were thought of as highly anticipated events.

Mal indicated for everyone to follow her and they made their way through into a large meeting room. The equipment therein was a little more sophisticated than that in the main office; these were things that had been brought over from headquarters and painstakingly installed, as opposed to the electronics that had been bought locally. The further one ventured into the residency, the more it looked like a local espionage hub and the less it lived up to its modest cover story. They all sat down and Belle took out her case file.

"First things first, the complication," Mal said, going over to the projector screen and enlarging a grainy candid surveillance photo. "We might as well get this over with before we start going into fine detail. As you know we've had Regina under increased surveillance ever since the engagement rumours began; Jefferson's been tearing his hair out with the number of camera parts we've been begging him for. The Mills family owns a large estate with stables outside the city. Regina loves to ride and it's pretty much the only place where Cora doesn't go; she prefers to remain here in the capital to keep an eye on her investments. Here's our complication. This was only found this morning, or else we would have contacted you sooner for a second opinion on what to do."

The picture's content was clear despite its dubious quality. Regina Mills was in the stables, hidden from everyone's view except the agency's cameras, and she was locked in a passionate embrace with a young man.

"Right," Gold said dryly. "I can see how this could be classed as a complication."

"His name's Daniel Ostler," Aurora explained. "He's Regina's bodyguard, has been since she was sixteen. She never goes anywhere without him."

Belle shook her head. "She's never mentioned him in her demands; she must know that we'll only make arrangements for her."

"I know." Mal sighed. "Regina plays the game well, she learned from one of the best players, and I'm not entirely sure that I know what to make of this. I can see five different possibilities for what's going on here. The first is that, like we've been fearing for the beginning, we're going to walk into a trap just like we did twenty years ago. Regina wants to use us as a scapegoat to get her mother and her fiancé out of the picture so that she can live a normal life."

"Likely," Leroy muttered. "She's her mother's daughter, after all."

Mal did not respond to Leroy's commentary and continued. "The second option is that she doesn't play the game as well as we think she does. We're always taught never to underestimate our opponents, our assets, our unreliable sources, but maybe in this case we have overestimated Regina. It could be that she honestly doesn't realise that this poses a problem for us. She's only young, after all, although she's been mixed up in Cora's affairs since she was born."

Henry Mills had been killed - at Cora's hand - before Regina had actually been born and as a result, Cora had had a complete monopoly on her daughter's life for the entirety of her existence. Belle could quite see why Regina would want to escape from the overbearing influence, but she could also appreciate the viewpoint of the more cynical members of the team who thought that Cora's teaching would have paid off and that blood ran thicker than water.

Mal continued to speak. "The third option, and the one I personally think most likely, is that this is a bombshell she plans to drop on us as a bargaining chip - it's not just her that we need to extract, but the boyfriend as well."

Gold nodded. "Likely. Might I make a suggestion for option four? He's under instruction from Cora to get close to Regina and learn all her plans and report back."

"Yes, that's option four," Mal said. "And there's the final option which is that she's not worried about leaving the boyfriend here after she escapes, but we're dismissing that one out of hand for now." She took her seat at the head of the table. "The question now is: what do we do with this unexpected new intelligence? It's your call, both of you two. We can abort this operation at any time and go back to our day jobs," Mal continued. "It makes much less difference to the residency than it does to you."

Belle sighed and leaned back in her chair. "Have you spoken to Blue about it?"

Mal wrinkled her nose. "I'd really rather not."

There was no love lost between Mal and Blue; Belle had quickly learned that during her communication with the Avalon resident in the run up to the operation beginning. Whilst there was not the same hatred that Gold felt towards Belle's superior, there was a distinct peevish tone in Mal's voice whenever she spoke about Blue. Blue had never been out to the residency, a place that Mal had basically made her home for the last several years. Mal was comfortable here, she had worked hard to build up the residency and the networks in the country, and she liked to be left alone to get on with things without the interference of higher-ups back in headquarters, who had no idea how life and espionage in the newly independent country worked in real life as opposed to theory on a computer screen.

"Besides, we all know what her response would be," Emma said.

Belle nodded sadly. "Get on with the operation as planned, extract Regina and leave the unexpected boyfriend. No deviations from the plan."

"Despite the fact that the unexpected boyfriend is likely to be a key ingredient in Regina's co-operation," Aurora pointed out, "and might jeopardise the entire assignment if he is reporting to Cora."

"No deviations," Mal repeated cynically. "If I ever get through an operation with no deviations, I'll retire there and then as I know I'll never have it so good again. So, since we're going to be using our initiative and not following Blue's advice, have you got any ideas, Gold?"

It was his life on the line, after all, when it all came down to it, and it made sense for him to have the final say.

There was silence for a long time before Gold spoke.

"We have got to go ahead," he said. "We've come too far to abort now and we won't have another chance before the wedding. After the wedding, of course, everything becomes much more complicated."

Everyone around the table nodded their agreement.

"What's the likelihood of Daniel being under Cora's orders?" Leroy asked, studying the photo in front of him then looking over at Aurora. "Don't suppose you can use your magic powers, Rory?"

Belle was confused for a moment until she remembered that Aurora had a degree in behavioural psychology and had previously applied for a position as a profiler before changing to the intelligence officer training programme.

The younger woman shook her head. "Not from one picture like this; if I had video I might be able to, but really you need enough material to be able to pick up patterns."

"I'm just wondering," Leroy continued, "because whilst I don't claim to know a lot about human nature, I think most of us have done something slightly stupid in the name of love before. Cora is completely set on her daughter marrying Leo White, and she's been priming Regina for this marriage for months. Obviously, Cora knows Regina better than anyone, but do we think that she would run the risk of jeopardising the wedding like this? For a start, Leo might be straight in his financials and associates, but he's certainly no fool; Cora's a business rival and he'll be keeping tabs on her and Regina. Then there's the risk of Regina acting out completely and calling off the wedding of her own accord because she's now involved with Daniel, and it would cause more trouble than it's worth for Cora to try and repair the damage. We already know how desperate Regina is to get away, surely Cora wouldn't give her any more fuel for the fire."

There was silence around the conference table for a while as Leroy's plaintive but astute words sank in.

"And the damage may well already have been done," Aurora pointed out sadly. "If Daniel is reporting to Cora, we have no idea how much information Regina has already passed to him."

It was a chilling fact but an unavoidable one.

"I think we can do things in much the same way as we were planning," Gold continued eventually, after another few minutes lost in thought. "But we need to take the opposite approach. Before, we were always going in with a very soft approach. We were appearing as the good guys, the guardian angels, the people who were going to save Regina from her mother. The best way to stop this unexpected hindrance from becoming a hindrance is to make it work in our favour. There's no element of surprise now, if Regina was hoping to use it. If we take a more aggressive approach to her..."

"Not too aggressive," Belle said. "We don't want to scare her off or spook her into making some kind of fatal mistake."

"A less gentle approach, then," Gold corrected. "If we inform her at the outset that we know about Daniel and we ask her to announce her intentions regarding him before we go any further, then we can work out how to deal with the problem before it becomes a problem; all parties will be working with the same information. We know about Daniel from the outset. Regina knows that we know about Daniel from the outset. Neither party has the upper hand. If we all start on the same page and the same understanding it will hopefully prevent Regina from bolting because her own plans aren't working."

Mal nodded. "Makes sense. I trust your judgement in these matters. Don't go in on the offensive completely or she _will_ run."

"Firm but gentle," Belle added. "Make it clear that we're on her side but we're not going to take any bullshit. And obviously, warn her not to share anything with Daniel until we can determine his intentions."

"What do we do about extraction?" Aurora asked. "I take it you've got escape passports with you?"

Belle nodded. They had three escape passports ready; a partially blank one ready to be mocked up for Regina and two fully filled ones for her and Gold should the need arise to burn the Spinner identities, but there was no contingency for having to extract more than one person.

"You can make escape passports here, can't you?" she asked.

Mal nodded. "Yes, we can, but it won't be as good as Documents' professionally forged ones from headquarters. On a scale of one to watertight, your escapes would hold, Regina's would probably hold, ours would be about a five."

Belle shrugged. "It's a chance we'll have to take; we don't have time to get anything sent from Docs."

"I'll get right on it," Leroy said, leaving the room. The others all stood by mutual consent and made their way back into the main office, but Belle noticed that Gold and Mal did not follow them and remained in the doorway to the meeting room, talking quietly.

"Thank you, Mal. I never got the chance to say it before, but it's important to be said," Gold was saying in a low voice. "Thanks for everything."

"All in a day's work, Rum." Mal paused. "I heard about what happened with Bae. I'm sorry."

There was a pause and then Belle heard Gold sigh.

"It's not your fault," he said eventually.

"I still feel like I ought to have done more."

Gold gave a snort of laughter. "You haven't changed a bit."

Out of the corner of her eye, Belle saw Mal smile.

"A few more frown lines, a few more ex-girlfriends. Same for you, I should imagine."

"Substitute the ex-girlfriends with grey hairs and you'd be right," Gold said dryly.

There was another long pause.

"Did you love her?" Mal asked presently.

Belle saw Gold shake his head minutely.

"No, I think in the end I didn't. It's hard after so many years and so much betrayal; the feelings get confused. But I think I was more in love with the idea of her."

Belle looked down at her keyboard, tuning out the conversation. It wasn't meant for her ears anyway; however much they might make their living by listening in on other people's secrets, there was a certain code of conduct amongst agents that kept them from spying on their own within their own territory. Still, she couldn't help but wonder. Were they talking about Cora Mills? It was no secret that Gold had spent a lot of time with her whilst trying to turn her and it would not be unheard of for feelings to develop in such close proximity. Belle shook herself, wishing that she didn't feel so jealous. Oh, the irony of feelings developing in close quarters. Here she was in a foreign country, sharing a hotel room with a man she barely knew, pretending to be married to him. She glanced over at Gold, comparing the man he was now to the twenty-year-old photograph of him that she had seen in the Foresight file. She had thought when she had first met him that perhaps the handsome young man he had been would show through in his smile, and she could now say categorically that it did. But that was not to say that he was not handsome now; beneath the pain and sorrow, the years had given him a certain gravitas and air of experience and knowledge that was not at all unattractive.

Belle shook herself crossly. She should not be having these thoughts, not now, not about a colleague and certainly not in the middle of an exceedingly dangerous operation.

"Everything ok, Belle?" Aurora asked. "Aside from the obvious?"

Belle nodded. "I'm fine. Wondering when life's going to stop throwing curveballs at us."

"I'm just glad that camera in the hayloft at the Mills manor proved useful," Leroy said. "We had one of our assets plant it and he was so nervous he dropped the thing three times; I'm amazed it still works."

Aurora nodded. "This is the first time we've captured any kind of romantic attention between the two of them and that particular spot in the stables is the only place where Cora doesn't have her own security cameras installed, it's a known blind spot on the estate which is why we put our own equipment there." She paused. "I'm still not completely convinced that Cora doesn't know what's going on, but whether she knows and is simply letting it run its course to see where it ends, or whether she knows because she's the one who instigated it is a completely different kettle of fish. Still, we've got to get on. The meeting between you and Regina is set up for tomorrow afternoon, 1500 hours, in the restaurant of the hotel you're staying at." Belle nodded her understanding; the meeting had been set up before they left England. "In the meantime, I think we probably all ought to think about calling it a night, it's getting late and we don't want to arouse too much suspicion."

"I'll stay here," Emma said, "I need to finish setting up all Jefferson's new bits and pieces."

Belle looked over her shoulder at Gold. He and Mal had fallen into silence and were looking over at the other group that was now gathered around Aurora's desk. Tomorrow the work would begin in earnest. They would meet Regina in the flesh for the first time and jump headlong into the fray.

Suddenly, everything felt far too real.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's embarrassing how long it has taken me to update this, really. *sigh*. Still, I hope you enjoy nonetheless!   
> TW: Mentions of past torture

It was only once they were back in the hotel room that the reality hit Belle and a sudden awkwardness came over her. They were pretending to be a married couple.

That meant that they were sharing a room that only had one bed.

For a moment, the two of them just stood there in the middle of the room, the reality still dawning on them, then Gold cleared his throat nervously. His gaze flickered across to the bed.

“I’ll take the sofa.”

“Don’t be silly,” Belle said firmly. "You’ve got a bad leg that the cold here’s only made worse.”

“I’m also a gentleman.”

Belle shook her head in despair.

“Gold, that bed is plenty big enough for us to share platonically.”

He gave a tired smile, and Belle knew that she’d won him over.

“All right, Mrs Spinner. Which side of the bed do you sleep on?” He paused. “Actually, first things first, you’d better have the bathroom before me. As you rightly pointed out, my leg is killing me at the moment and I don’t want to take anything that might make me the slightest bit fuzzy tomorrow, so a long, scalding hot bath is probably the only way that I’m going to be able to move in the morning.”

Belle nodded her understanding and unpacked her wash bag and pyjamas from her suitcase, taking them into the bathroom and spending a good couple of minutes trying to work out how to turn the shower on. She was glad of the hot water to ease the tension in her shoulders, one that she hadn’t even realised that she’d been carrying around with her. Certainly, she had been on edge ever since they had arrived in the country, but she had not felt the incredible physical burden until just now. It was a weight she didn’t feel until after it was gone, but she couldn’t deny that it was nice to be rid of it for a precious few moments.

She turned her face up to the spray, indulging a little longer, before feeling a little guilty at keeping Gold away from his bath for any great length of time and she turned off the water, towelling herself dry quickly and wrapping her hair up in a turban before she put on her pyjamas. In the misted mirror, she could only just make out the vague forms of her reflection, but she didn’t bother wiping the condensation away. Belle had no desire to see her face right now, tired and drawn and at the same time almost hyper-aware. She was exhausted, but she was also very awake, vigilant. The shower had relaxed her body but her mind was still whirring away, going over the plans and fallbacks for the next day’s meeting for the umpteenth time. She paused with her hand on the door handle, looking down at herself. For the first time, she was incredibly conscious of the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra, and even though she was covered from collar bone to ankles, she still felt very bare. It wasn’t really the state of undress that was in and of itself a problem. She’d worked in close proximity with Emma many times and they’d seen each other naked more than once, but somehow with Gold, it was different. Until now, they had only ever seen each other in a purely professional capacity. Emma was a friend; the entire way that they interacted around each other was completely different to the relationship between Belle and Gold, which was one of colleagues who had been thrown together by circumstance and who had really not had a chance to properly learn anything about each other. They knew the cosmetics: they had to in order to keep their cover identities watertight. But really, when Belle thought about it, there was so much about Gold that she really didn’t know, and really wanted to know but would never dare to ask, not on such a short acquaintance.

She sighed, pushing the thoughts to the back of her mind, and left the bathroom. There was no point in feeling self-conscious now.

“All yours.” She put on an unconcerned smile, wondering why she was unaccountably so awkward now. Perhaps it was her mind’s way of getting all of the distracting thoughts out of her head now before everything began in earnest tomorrow and she had to be completely clear-headed and focussed.

It was not that Belle feared any impropriety on Gold’s part; far from it. He was a gentleman, after all. Belle had not been around him long but she had been around him long enough to know that his earlier words were true, even if they had been spoken half in jest. It was more the fact that she was thinking about him in such intimate terms in the first place; that she kept thinking about the hug that Gold and Mal had shared back at the residency and wondering what it would be like to hug the quiet misanthrope with whom she now shared a room.

She forced the thought down. They were on an assignment, this was completely inappropriate.

All the same, Belle was glad when Gold limped into the bathroom with a grateful nod and locked the door behind him. The respite did not last long, however, as she heard the sound of water running and fabric whispering over skin. She groaned and fell forward onto the bed, burying her face in her pillow as if it would somehow blot out the unhelpful thoughts.

_Stop thinking about your colleague in the bath, goddammit Belle!_

She wondered if he had any tattoos. He’d spent a significant amount of time in prison, after all, but he’d been in solitary for a lot of it, at least, that’s what the case notes seemed to suggest.

Belle planted her face in the pillow once more as she realised that she was once again off track in her thoughts. Cross with herself for getting carried away, and putting it down to tiredness catching up with her wired brain, she brushed and braided her hair and got into bed, settling down to read.

She’d picked the novel up at the airport to give her some reading material for the three hour flight; she couldn’t very well work on her notes on the plane. It was a generic historical romance, lots of sighing and swooning maidens and not much substance to it, but it was what she needed; something that didn’t require all that much brain power. She always tried to end each day with a book if she could. Fiction helped her escape her fears, doubts and regrets, and half an hour spent in someone else’s life helped her to sleep easier in her own.

“What are you reading?”

Gold’s voice made her jump and she looked up to see him framed in the bathroom doorway, watching her with interest. He was wearing a t-shirt and plaid pyjama pants, arms crossed over his slim chest and hair damp and tousled, and it was so odd to see him dressed in anything other than his usual impeccably cut suit that she was rendered mute for a moment. For all her ponderings earlier, she had really not been prepared for actually seeing him look so casual.

Belle held up the book and Gold nodded. The moment lasted a split second too long and Belle went back to her reading with an embarrassed cough whilst Gold moved round to the other side of the bed, getting comfortable against the pillows and reaching down to rub his ankle. Belle glanced across at him. Barefoot with his brace off, she could see the extensive scarring that webbed over the joint, and the lump of the bone that had been broken or dislocated and set by inexpert hands.

“What happened?” She couldn’t help but ask the question. She didn’t expect an answer, and it took her by surprise when Gold responded.

“I was desperate.”

Belle’s brow furrowed. “You did this to yourself?”

Gold nodded, and for a moment he was completely still, his hand curled around his ankle, thumb pressing into the joint as if it was an anchor of some sort for him.

“I spent a lot of time ankle-cuffed to things.” His tone was clipped, informational. He wasn’t looking for sympathy, he was stating facts. “I got quite creative in my desperation. Actually managed to get the cuff off once.” He ran his fingertips over the misshapen bone. “Of course, I couldn’t walk afterwards so it was a pyrrhic victory.”

Belle wanted to say sorry, but she knew that Gold wouldn’t appreciate it. He seemed to move out of his stillness then, getting his legs under the covers and shuffling down until he was horizontal before looking at the book that lay forgotten on her pillow. “Any good?” he asked. The conversation was closed, the topic was changed, and Belle knew better than to mention it again. She looked down at _Her Handsome Hero_ and wrinkled her nose.

“It’s not great. Usual bodice-ripper fare without the bodice ripping.”

Gold snorted, then shifted around to get comfortable, pillowing one hand under his head and staring up at the ceiling. Knowing that she wasn’t going to get any more reading done, both out of her own tiredness and lack of ability to concentrate, and the distraction of having another human being in quite such close and intimate proximity, Belle put her book onto the nightstand and snuggled down under the covers herself. It was quite cool in the room, and she was glad of the thick blankets.

“Good night, Gold,” she said, reaching over to turn out the light.

“Good night, Belle.”

X

Belle woke suddenly in the middle of the night, not quite able to place what had roused her so efficiently. Her first thought was to look towards the door, but there was nothing to show any signs of anything untoward, similarly at the window. Only once she had established their safety did she put the bedside lamp on, and turn her eyes towards her colleague. He was still asleep, but the slumber was not at all restful; there was a frown on his face and his hands were curled into fists in the blankets, twisting them out of shape. Presently his bad leg jerked and Belle shuffled to the side to avoid an unconscious kick.

“Gold,” she whispered. “Gold, are you all right?”

His breathing was shallow, laboured, and sweat was beading on his forehead.

“No…” he whimpered in his sleep. “No… Please… No…”

“Gold…” Belle reached across but stopped short of actually touching him; trying to shake him awake was probably not the best of ideas given the violence of his dream. “Gold, it’s just a dream, please, wake up. You’re all right, you’re safe.”

“No… Please… Not her, not her… BELLE!”

His eyes shot open and he sat bolt upright, panting heavily, eyes darting around the room wildly in the same pattern that Belle’s had upon waking, finally settling on Belle’s concerned expression beside him, and he pressed his hands over his face, breathing still forced and on the verge of hyperventilating.

“Gold, are you all right?” Belle asked. It was the only thing that she could think of to say in the circumstances but she knew how ridiculous the question sounded. Of course he wasn’t all right, and she did not begrudge him the very sarcastic response he snarled out at her.

“Peachy, thanks.” He continued to sit, head in hands, for about a minute, before he swung his legs out of the bed and raced to the bathroom as fast as his limp could take him, slamming the door closed. A second later, Belle heard him vomit. She sighed and drew her knees up to her chest, running her hand through her hair. Emma had made the observation before they’d started on the fieldwork, that whilst Gold might still have perfect tradecraft despite the long interval since he was last in active service, the human mind was a delicate and fragile thing, and no-one, not even Gold himself, would be able to tell how being back in Avalon would affect him until he got here. He’d said that he would be fine, and during the day, he had been. But if his unconscious mind was turning against him, well, Belle had no idea how either of them were going to be able to fix that. All she could do was hope that this would not have any negative effect on his day-to-day work, and they could keep this episode within the confines of the hotel room.

Presently the toilet flushed in the bathroom and the sound of teeth being brushed could be heard. Perhaps if he got it all out of his system now, on the first night, then the rest of their stay in this dark and dismal place would be unaffected. Belle knew that it was a small and forlorn hope, but she had to try and find a positive somewhere in the midst of their increasingly dire situation. Gold appeared in the bathroom doorway again, and Belle looked over at him.

“Sorry I woke you,” he mumbled.

"It’s no matter,” Belle said gently. “Nightmares happen to everyone.”

Gold nodded. “I suppose you’re right,” he said bitterly, before limping back to the bed and lying back down with a groan. He was silent for a long time before speaking again.

"I was doing so well," he said, and Belle could hear the sarcasm and self-loathing in his voice. "I think it's just being back here... The moment I walked out of the airport it hit me. The air here smells the same now as it did twenty years ago. It's seedy, grimy; the war's still lingering in people's minds. It's in living memory for most people. You can tell."

Belle nodded. There was something oppressive in the atmosphere now that she thought about it, but she had put her first feelings of unshakeable unease down to nervousness at the operation that they were about to undertake. She looked sideways at Gold; he was still staring at the ceiling, arms crossed protectively over his chest. There was something more than defensive in the gesture. It was almost as if he had to physically hold himself together in case he fell apart in his raw and vulnerable state.

"It just brings back thoughts I'd rather forget," he added finally.

Belle felt nothing but sympathy for him. She couldn't imagine how he must be feeling.

"Do you want to talk about it?" she asked gently.

Gold snorted. "It's hardly a bedtime story, Belle."

"I wasn't expecting one," she replied firmly. "I may not have worked in this field for as long as you have and I may not have had the same experiences, but I am not naive."

"No, you're not," Gold agreed. "And I would never wish my experiences on anyone, not even Blue, but especially not you." He paused. "I haven't talked about this for years. I barely talked about it when I was convalescing at the House as it was."

Belle nodded. "Granny said that you wouldn't talk about it when you got back. You wouldn't tell anyone what had happened out here."

"I was so damn _angry_ when I got back." Gold sighed. "I suppose that part of the reason I didn't talk - aside from having to relive the most humiliating experience of my life - was that I was simply too bloody-minded. I couldn't believe that, having abandoned me to my fate for so long, they could possibly be interested in my mental wellbeing. All they wanted to do was find out how much of the information I had known now had to be considered blown. I was certain that they simply didn't care. Like my captors before them, they were only interested in what I could do for them. So I just shut up and glared. I'd been through enough interrogation and I was so used to it at that point. Tamping down everything behind layers upon layers of mental armour had become second nature."

"I care," Belle said softly. "I care about the way you're feeling. So if you want to talk about it, I'm here."

Gold didn't respond, and they fell into silence again. Belle adjusted her position to get more comfortable but hopefully avoid nodding off if Gold did decide to start talking. It didn't look like he was going to go back to sleep any time soon.

"Nothing prepares you for the real thing," he said eventually. "Nothing. You do your counter-interrogation training and your endurance training and your resistance training, but all the time you're doing it, you get through it because there's a tiny little solitary thought in the back of your mind that you can cling to that says _this isn't real_. When it happens for real, you don't have that final little defence mechanism. You can't kid yourself that if you just hold out a little bit longer, it'll all be over and Granny will come in and give you a cup of tea and some jammy dodgers. I swear, I dreamed about tea and biscuits for years. You try so hard to think that it's just a game and it doesn't matter. It is a game, of sorts, but it does matter. You can't lose. If you fail counter-interrogation, you get kicked off the training course, but that's the worst that can happen. When it's real, it's not even the fear of death that drives you. You don't care whether or not _you_ survive their little game, because most of the time you wish you were dead anyway. You know they won't kill you as long as you keep your mouth shut - it's a vicious circle like that. But you've got networks and assets and intel and colleagues to protect. You can't break, and you have nothing to cling to in order to stop you breaking."

Belle propped herself up on one elbow.

"You'll get through this trip," she said. "I promise."

Gold gave a very sad smile, finally turning to face her. His mental walls were down; for the first time Belle could get a proper read on his emotions. Whereas before, back home at the agency, everything had been hidden behind a thick veneer of anger and hatred, now she could see the very real fear in his eyes.

"Six years," he whispered. "Six miserable years and I swore I'd never set foot in this hellhole of a country again."

Carefully, Belle reached across and took one of his hands, squeezing gently.

“You’ll get home again,” she said. “I promise that I will get you out of here in one piece and this time next week, you’ll be back in Lochdubh with your dogs and your antiques, and we’ll never bother you again.”

Gold gave a weak laugh. “You can’t possibly know that, Belle.” Belle just shrugged in response.

“I have hope.”

“And that is the greatest difference between you and me. I’ve been all out of hope for a very long time.” Gold tentatively returned the pressure of her hand. “Go back to sleep, Belle. We both need to be at our best and brightest tomorrow. We’re meeting Regina, after all. The main event begins.”

Belle nodded, and she made herself comfortable against her pillows, closing her eyes. She knew better than to try and make Gold get some more sleep; she trusted him to know what best to do for himself in these situations, but she did not make any move to try and extract her hand from his grip. She had offered it as an anchor, a lifeline, and he had taken it. She would be the last person to remove it for any reason. Belle opened her eyes momentarily again, glancing down at their aspect. To the casual observer, they could have been any married couple on a business trip: tired, worn down, sharing an uncomfortable bed with no desire to make love but still a need for the intimacy of touch.

She thought back to just before Gold had woken, to the garbled words that he had shouted. She didn’t want to think too much into them, but now that he was calm and quiet once more and she did not need to worry quite so much about his physical or mental health, his voice in her head would not be quiet.

_Not her, not her… BELLE!_

He had been dreaming about her, in some respect. Dreaming of her captured and tortured in front of him? She shivered at the thought, but at the same time she could not help but wonder. Was there any reason why he should dream of her specifically? Was it simply because she was his partner on this trip and she was in just as much danger as he was should their cover be blown, or was there any other kind of deeper meaning behind it? If he was worried about a good friend, a person he cared about deeply, then it would make more sense for Mal to be the one in his head.

Belle shook the thought out of her mind and settled down to sleep again. Just as she was drifting off, she felt Gold link his fingers through hers, holding onto her hand more tightly.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry that this has taken so ridiculously long to update, but I have now finished writing it and therefore updates will be on a weekly basis from now on. Enjoy!

Grey light was inching its way around the curtains when Belle woke, and the first thing that she noticed on stretching out her arms and legs was that Gold was no longer in the bed beside her. She glanced around the room, wondering where he could have got to when something caught the corner of her eye and she turned her attention towards the bathroom. The door was slightly open, probably so that he could use the dim light from the room instead of turning on the bathroom light and fan and waking her with the sound, and Belle could see the mirror and Gold’s reflection in it as he shaved. He was naked from the waist up, his concentration sharp as the razor he was holding as he worked in the limited light, and as Belle focussed through the gloom, she saw the full extent of what had been done to him on his last visit to Avalon. Extensive scarring webbed across his chest and abdomen, and Belle’s stomach turned as she recognised the tell-tale marks of branding and electrical burns. Some of the worst marks had been covered in tattoos, bits and pieces of script in Latin and what she presumed was Gaelic. She wanted to ask him what they meant, but she knew that she had not been meant to see this and she could not in good faith talk to him about it. She drew her knees up to her chest beneath the covers, not wanting to think about the horrors that he had endured throughout his imprisonment, and wishing that she didn’t want to map his battle marks with her fingers and try to kiss away all the pain. He was a colleague, nothing more, and such idle thoughts could end up getting both of them killed, or worse.

Presently he finished, splashing the last traces of shaving cream from his face and his reflection moving away from the mirror. A moment later she caught a glimpse of his back; the scarring there was worse than his front had been, marks from some kind of lash striking stark white lines across the skin. Then he put his undershirt on and everything was once more hidden away, out of sight and out of mind. Belle shook herself out of the melancholy train of thought, focussing on the assignment. This afternoon they would be meeting with Regina, and there was really nothing to do until that time arrived except keep an eye out on the hotel and make sure that everything was safe. Emma and the residency were handling the back end technical work, all Gold and Belle had to do was wait and pray that everything went according to plan. They still had to work out the best way to approach the subject of Daniel without scaring Regina off, and what to do if she arrived with some kind of extra entourage in tow. Emma would also be there at the meet as backup, but three of them against Cora’s resources were not odds that Belle liked to bet on.

Gold left the bathroom then, buttoning his shirt, and he smiled when he saw Belle was awake. Now that she could see him more closely, she could see the dark circles under his eyes, and she wondered if he’d got any sleep at all last night after his nightmare. She wouldn’t blame him if he hadn’t, but at the same time she needed him to be at his most awake and alert today. This was it, all their preparation work would pay off this afternoon.

“Hey,” he said. “Good morning and welcome to judgement day.”

Belle snorted. “Yeah, when you put it like that it doesn’t seem like we’re faced with an impossible task at all.”

“I wouldn’t say that it was impossible. Just difficult. Everything that we do is difficult.” Gold sat down on the end of the bed as Belle slipped out of it. “Shall I order us some breakfast?”

It seemed like such a mundane thing to say after they had just been talking about the daunting task ahead of them and Belle had to laugh.

“Sure, she said. They couldn’t very well start the day on empty stomachs after all, and getting breakfast from room service would not attract all that much attention. According to the hotel they were travelling for business and probably had a gruelling schedule ahead of them. When Belle emerged from the bathroom having dressed and completed her ablutions, Gold was just putting the telephone receiver down.

“It’ll be about fifteen minutes.”

Belle nodded and went over to the window, peering around the curtain just a fraction, so that no-one outside the building would be able to see her face, just the fabric twitching. Normally she hated hiding out in hotel rooms and having to keep the curtains closed against possible prying eyes; she enjoyed having the natural light in the room, but in Avalon there was really no exciting scenery to take in, and the light outside could barely be called light. More… not dark, but not really light either.

There was nothing to see outside, nothing obvious at least. The buildings on the street opposite the hotel were all fairly innocuous businesses and although long years in the security service had shown her that the enemy could really be hiding anywhere, there were no obvious spots that they had to be worried about. She let the curtain fall back into place and went back over to Gold, who had since migrated to the sofa and was setting out the surveillance photos from the Mills estate on the coffee table, taking pictures of them with his phone.

“Just testing out the gadgetry,” he said. “If Regina brings any documentation to this meeting I want to be able to get it out to the residency as soon as possible. Just in case.”

Belle nodded, as grim as the thought was, it made sense. The app that Jefferson had designed and installed on Gold’s phone immediately encrypted any images or scans and sent them via the residency’s secure VPN before wiping the memory.

There was a knock at the door and the call of ‘room service’. Belle raised an eyebrow; the voice had sounded suspiciously like Leroy, and she padded quietly over to the door, looking through the peephole to see that it was indeed the resident agent, standing outside wearing a hotel waiter’s uniform and looking like he wanted to be anywhere else but here. Belle suppressed a snort of laughter and let him into the room.

“All right,” he said once the door was locked and bolted behind him, and he took the covers off the dishes on his trolley. “We’ve got toast, scrambled eggs, fruit salad, and firepower.” The last plate contained service weapons. They’d had to enter the country unarmed for obvious reasons, and Belle knew how antsy Gold had been in the absence of something to protect himself with in this dangerous country.

“Thank you, Leroy.” Gold shrugged off his jacket and put on the shoulder holster, checking the pistol with a practised hand before stowing it. Belle took the other gun, slightly smaller and more discreet, and having performed the same checks, strapped it to her calf where her wide-legged slacks would hide it.

“Have you got the actual waiter knocked out and stuffed in the bottom of the trolley?” Gold asked lightly. Leroy rolled his eyes and lifted the tablecloth, there was nothing to see there.

“No, I just used my incredible persuasion skills to get the actual guy to let me take his place,” the shorter man said. “What? I went through all the same training as you guys did.”

“We weren’t knocking your ability to win friends and influence people, Leroy,” Belle said. “We just weren’t expecting to see you here, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes you draw the short straw. Mal was getting twitchy and wanted to make sure you two weren’t left unarmed for longer than necessary, but she’s got Blue talking her ear off on the phone at the moment and Emma can’t be seen with you to maintain deniability. And Rory’s off meeting with assets and making sure the fall backs are in place, so muggins here was left on delivery duty.”

“Well, we’re very grateful to you, Leroy,” Belle said. “Do you want to stay and have some breakfast?”

“No, I’m fine thanks.” He paused. “Sorry about your bacon, Gold. You know how it is. Something’s got to give when you’re trying to look legit, and in this case it was the bacon.” Leroy didn’t sound all that sorry and Belle suspected that the bacon had in fact ended up in Leroy’s possession, but it was a small sacrifice to make to get them armed again.

“I can live without bacon for a day,” Gold said. “We’ll keep in touch.”

“Do. I’ve never seen Mal so antsy about an assignment. Working out here for as long as she has, she’s seen pretty much everything there is to see and she’s done most of it too. There’s something about this one that’s making her nervous. She cares about you a lot, Gold. Not in that way, I mean, obviously, but as a friend.”

“I know,” Gold said. “Believe me, I feel the same way.”

Leroy nodded, and the two men seemed to come to an understanding in that moment, united by their friendship to a woman who had done so much for them both over the years.

“Well, I’d best be off, if I hang around in here too long people are going to start getting suspicious.” Leroy wheeled the trolley back out of the room and once Belle had locked up again, they sat down to breakfast. The food was good, for all that it had gone a little cold during their conversation, and it felt strange to Belle to be sitting here enjoying a leisurely meal when there was so much at stake.

All the same, there was nothing left to do except wait.

X

_“Testing comms.”_

The sudden message in Belle’s earpiece made her start. She’d been expecting to hear Emma’s voice all afternoon so it shouldn’t have come as a shock, but having someone speak to you directly in your ear without any warning was still a surprise.

“Copy,” she replied.

“Copy.” Gold’s voice echoed a little, hearing it through her earpiece on one side and from his mouth on the other where he was sitting beside her in the small area of the hotel lobby that was generously called a lounge.

_“The safety signals are in place and I’m all set up.”_

Belle glanced across to the restaurant on the other side of the reception desk; Emma was seated at a table near the entrance with her laptop set up and a pot of tea on the table with her. She wasn’t looking in their direction but gazing around the restaurant, turning her head slowly and pointedly. The glasses she was wearing were one of Jefferson’s latest acquisitions with the same technology as the phones, recording everything they saw and transmitting it back to the residency and an off-site data store whilst keeping nothing incriminating in the glasses themselves.

“Guess that’s our cue then.” Gold got up out of his armchair and held out a hand to help Belle up. She grabbed her briefcase and took the offered hand.

“Thank you, darling.” They had to sell the idea that they were husband and wife, after all, but subtlety was key, if they went too over the top then everyone would know that it was just an act just as much as they would recognise too much distance or awkwardness between them. They made their way over to the restaurant where a table had been reserved for them for afternoon tea. And discussion of state secrets, Belle added mentally as the maitre d’ showed them to a table at the edge of the room, away from any windows and with clear exit routes in two directions. Emma gave them no notice as they passed her table, continuing to type and occasionally glancing down at the smartphone on the table beside her, working its magic.

The tea was brought, and Belle poured herself a cup, settling down to keep watch for Regina’s arrival.

She was a lovely young woman, still fresh-faced and with the blush of youth in her cheeks, her long dark hair braided down her back making her look younger than her years but the air of worry in her expression aging her a little. She entered with Daniel, speaking a few words to him before he went over to sit in the lounge, his watchful eyes moving between the main entrance doors, the restaurant, and Regina herself as she went over to the maitre d’. Belle saw the moment she took a deep breath and bolstered her confidence, becoming an inch or so taller as she made her way across the restaurant towards them. Emma picked up her phone as she went past, tapping the screen a couple of times.

_“She’s clean,”_ Emma’s voice said in Belle’s ear. _“Scramble anyway.”_

Belle put Jefferson’s flip phone on the table, neatly hidden behind the teapots. Although they would always have misdirected anything that was listening in, it was good to know that Regina wasn’t wearing any kind of wire or earpiece that Emma’s phone had detected. It gave Belle the confidence that this was a legitimate assignment and that they were not walking into another trap. She and Gold stood as Regina approached them, shaking hands and completing all the normal formalities of a business meeting before sitting down and letting their actual tradecraft do its work.

“I brought some information that I thought you might want to look over,” Regina began, extracting a couple of files from her large designer handbag, but not handing them over. “But before we get started, I just wanted to know how serious you were about my proposition.”

“We promised that we would help you, Regina,” Gold said, his voice soft and soothing. “And I always keep my promises.”

There was no kind of reassurance that they could give her other than their word; anything that could show who they were or betray their intentions of getting her out of the country and away from her mother would be potential leverage, so Regina was just going to have to trust them. Now that she was right in front of them, Belle could see just how scared Regina was at her precarious position, starting on such a dangerous and illegal course of action out of sheer desperation to be free. Belle glanced across at Gold. There was something paternal in his eyes when he looked at Regina, and she wondered if he was thinking about his own child and what he perceived as his failure to his son.

Regina gave a slow nod and handed over the folders to Gold, letting him have a read of them and scan them surreptitiously with his phone. They were the bottom halves of the intel that she had sent through the agency in the preceding weeks, just as she had promised. The fact that she was sticking to her original plan made Belle think that now was probably the right time to broach the subject of Daniel with her. Regina was watching her closely as Gold worked, not entirely trusting yet, and Belle sensed that she was probably going to have to play into the bad cop persona if she was going to get anywhere. She was the lead on this assignment and she was going to have to be blunt.

“Does Mr Ostler know why you’re here today?” she asked.

“Oh.” A slight flush coloured Regina’s cheeks. “Erm… No. Not exactly.”

“How much does he know?”

“Not a lot,” Regina said. “Not everything. But… He knows I’m doing all this behind Mother’s back, obviously. And he knows…” She looked around the restaurant nervously.

“As long as you’re sitting at the table you can speak freely,” Gold said.

“He knows I want to leave,” Regina finished. “So I think he suspects that this might be related to that.”

“Regina, I don’t think that there’s any way to sugar coat this so I won’t. We have to ask you what your intentions are for Daniel after we get you out of here,” Belle said plainly. “We know that he appears to mean more to you than just being your bodyguard.”

Regina looked over her shoulder at Daniel, who was still sitting in the lobby keeping an eye out.

“I knew that it would be too much to try and ask you to get him out as well,” she said. “And it might cause more problems if it looked like he’d kidnapped me or something. So I thought I could perhaps just give him the slip and then he could come over legitimately later, once it had all calmed down.”

“Regina, you know your mother,” Gold said. “We both know her. If you leave as planned, life will not be plain sailing for the man who was supposed to be protecting you.”

“Stopping me from running away, you mean?” Regina said bitterly. “I know. I thought that I could, I don’t know, give him the day off or something so it would look like it was all my idea. Which it is.”

“Don’t panic,” Gold said. “And don’t turn around again,” he added as Regina began to glance over her shoulder towards Daniel again. “The more you do that, the more you’ll look like you don’t want to be here and draw attention to yourself and us. We can work out what we’re doing about Daniel at a later date although I trust he has his own passport.”

Regina nodded. “Yes. I…” She sighed. “We were so discreet, how did you find out about us? Because if you can find out, then Mother could find out, and then I dread to think what would happen.”

“Let’s just say that we’ve been keeping an eye on your situation for a while now,” Belle said. “We don’t know what your mother knows. We only know what we know, and what we know is that you two are both in a very dangerous position right now. Our focus has to be on you. You are the one who can give us the information that we want.”

Belle was about to speak again but Gold stopped her with a swift cutting motion of his hand, his entire frame going stiff beside her.

“Abort and fall back,” he hissed through his teeth, before getting up from the table and moving through the restaurant. His pace was casual and to all intents and purposes he would blend into the scene as the waiters moved around bearing trays and coffee pots, but Belle knew that something had gone very wrong.

“What’s happening?” Regina asked as Belle gathered up her handbag, and at the same time Emma asked in her ear _“what the hell just happened?”_

“We’ve been compromised,” Belle said, quickly putting all their documents and equipment into her bag and sweeping the table for anything she might have missed. The strapping around her shin felt suddenly very heavy with the possibility that she might have to use it. “We have to fall back. The contact who set up this meeting gave you a fall back point, didn’t they?”

Regina nodded. “Six pm at the Mother of Mercy chapel.”

“Good. You know the safety signals, and we’ll see you there.” She shook Regina’s hand again. “I’m sorry that this meeting was cut short, Miss Mills, but I’m certain that our partnership will be profitable in the future.”

_“Belle, Gold’s gone into the gents,”_ Emma’s voice said in her ear as Regina left the table and made her way back over to Daniel.

“Great,” Belle muttered. “The one place I can’t follow him.”

_“The one place that half of the rest of the population can’t follow him as well,”_ Emma pointed out, before asking for the bill. Belle glanced over to see that she was packing up her laptop and phone as she handed the waiter a couple of notes to pay for her meal. _“Whatever it was that made him abort, I’m thinking it was a woman, but the only one I can imagine who’d cause such a reaction is the Queen herself and she’s definitely not here.”_

Belle waited at the table for a moment to see Regina and Daniel safely out of the restaurant and check that no-one followed them, and to see if Gold would respond on comms, but he appeared to be following a blackout protocol and had probably ditched his earpiece on his way out of the restaurant. She couldn’t say she blamed him for his paranoia, but she wished she knew what it was that had triggered the abort. It was standard practice that if someone on the comms channel called to abort then you aborted with no questions asked, but a small part of Belle wondered if perhaps this particular shut down had been unnecessary. She knew she shouldn’t be questioning Gold’s ability, but she had already seen the effect that being back in Avalon was having on him.

_“I’m falling back to the residency, call me as soon as you can. And trust Gold to follow procedure if nothing else.”_

Belle nodded. Confident that Gold knew what he was doing and that his paranoia would keep him alive, and that Regina and Daniel were in no immediate danger, she charged the restaurant bill to their room tab and made her way back there, still wondering what it was that could have happened.


	9. Chapter 9

**Nine**

Gold arrived in the room about twenty minutes after Belle did, and he gave a long groan, sitting down heavily on the sofa and scrubbing his hands over his face.

“Sorry it took a while, I wanted to go the long way round to make sure everything was all right,” he said.

“Well, you’re here now and we’re safe,” Belle said. “That’s all that matters for the moment.”

“I’m sorry I took off so suddenly, I trust that you got Regina away with no difficulties?”

“I did; we’re going to meet her at the fall back point as previously arranged.”

“Good.” Gold closed his eyes, letting out a heartfelt sigh, and Belle sat down beside him, gently closing her hand over his own where it was balled into a fist, pounding against his thigh. He stilled under her touch, tensing a little before realising that it was only Belle and she posed no threat.

“Gold…” she began. “What happened? Why did you abort the meet?”

“She walked in,” Gold said. “I couldn’t let her see me. That would have been the end of it for all three of us.”

“Who?” Belle asked. “Cora wasn’t there.”

“I’m not talking about Cora.” Gold opened his eyes and regarded her blearily. “If I ask for a double whiskey you’re not going to let me have one, are you?”

Belle shook her head. “No drinking on assignment, you know that.”

“Yeah, there’s no drinking at the house either but that didn’t stop Granny smuggling me in a stash of Glenfiddich when I was there,” Gold muttered. He stared straight ahead for a while, his eyes unseeing and his mind evidently several years back in the past, back in a place that he did not want to revisit. “I don’t know her name; I only knew her as the Captain. The first prison I was in when I was captured… And you know it’s always the first one that’s the worst because they try and get as much information out of you as they can whilst it’s still fresh, before your networks have had time to shut down and get out… She was the big cheese there, and God above, she loved her job.” His voice was snarling and bitter.

“Gold, you don’t have to tell me the details,” Belle said. “You don’t have to go back there; I can fill in the gaps.”

“No, you need to know,” Gold said, his voice clipped and neutral, the same tone he had used with her last night when he had been discussing how he came by his ankle injury. “You need to know the kind of monster that you’re dealing with here. Because if the Captain’s involved, if she was there on Cora’s orders or if she was there for any other reason than coincidence, and I really don’t believe in coincidence, then we’ve got one hell of a problem.”

Belle kicked off her shoes and tucked her feet up underneath her on the sofa. “Ok then,” she said. “Tell me what I need to know.”

“Well, like all good interrogators, she’s a sadist with no respect for human life,” Gold said flippantly. “I’m sure we’ve got a few of those in our own ranks of inquisitors. I called her the wicked witch of the west because she cackled like anything when she was in a particularly good mood.” He went on to outline some of the things that had been done to him when he had first been captured, and Belle’s stomach roiled again, threatening to lose the tea and scones she’d just consumed. Avalon wasn’t covered by the Geneva Convention, it was still too new and there were still too many nations that insisted it was not a country of its own right but still a part of Misthaven, even though Misthaven refused to take any responsibility for what happened beyond the border.

“The thing was, even after they’d given up trying to break me and moved me out of the hellhole, she seemed to make it her personal mission to break me. Not because she particularly wanted the information, but because she wanted the pleasure of knowing she had completely ruined me. She followed me around every time I was moved, kept paying me little visits right up until the time I was swapped out. Then, of course, I found out that Blue could have got me out two years before I came home. I had to endure an extra two years of that… demon because Blue thought that if she waited, she could get a better deal for us. Not for me, of course, she didn’t care that I was living in my own personal hell with my own personal devil.”

His hand went to his left hip, the fingers clenching a little, and Belle worried her bottom lip between her teeth. She hadn’t seen that far down when she’d been watching him in the mirror earlier, but she could tell that there was a particular scar beneath his clothes there.

“One of her names begins with a Z,” he said quietly. “I’ve got her initials hotwired onto me forever. She wanted to mark me as hers.”

“Oh Gold…” Belle wanted to hold him and tell him that it was all going to be all right, but she had no way of knowing that, and she knew that the only sympathy and comfort that she could offer him had to be of a strictly professional nature.

“That’s the Captain,” he finished curtly. “And whatever happens, I am not letting you or Regina fall into her filthy hands.”

There was a moment of silence, a minute or so of respect for the terrible things that Gold had just relived, but then it was over, and their assignment had to continue.

“We need to check in with Emma and the residency,” Belle said, grabbing her laptop and opening up a secure communication channel.

_“Are you two ok?”_ Mal’s voice said in her earpiece as the call connected.

“We’re fine,” Gold replied. “We’ve fallen back but we’re still on track for the next meet.”

_“What happened?”_ Emma asked. _“I’m parsing the footage from the restaurant now but I can’t see anything out of the ordinary. Who came in?”_

“Roll the footage, I’ll show you.”

The video footage from Emma’s glasses began to play on Belle’s laptop screen at double speed.

“Stop,” Gold said, pointed to the screen at a red-headed woman wearing green from head to toe as she entered he restaurant with a couple of men in business attire. It looked like a trade meeting much like theirs with Regina had been rather than anything related to counter-intelligence, but since the business meeting with Regina was a cover for espionage, it really wasn’t much to go on. “That’s her. The red-head. She’s aged gracefully, I must say. Murder must be good for the complexion.”

“Can you run a trace on her?” Belle asked. “We don’t have a name, just a rank.”

_“I don’t need to,”_ Mal said. Her voice was strangled with horror and disbelief. _“That’s Zelena Greene, she’s the Head of International Development in the Avalon government. She’s one we keep tabs on. I knew she was ex-military, most of the government are, they all fought in the war of independence, but I never thought… My God, Gold, I’m so sorry.”_

“Well, with any luck she didn’t see me and we’re safe,” Gold said. “But all the same, if we can find out why she was there I’d be a lot happier. If she’s on Cora’s payroll then we’re fucking doomed.”

_“We’ll get through this, Rum,”_ Mal said. _“I promise.”_

It was a dangerous promise to make, and Belle knew that in that moment, Mal would stop at nothing to keep it. They had gone beyond their assignment now, she felt. Certainly, everyone always needed to be on their guard and they needed to be prepared for every eventuality and then some, but now it seemed like there was a matter of honour at stake. There was vengeance to be had, wrongs to be righted and scores to be settled on behalf of old friends. They always said not to get too close to people in this job, in case you lost them or you had to betray them or they ended up betraying you. Never trust anyone, never get close to anyone. But humans were social creatures and it was hard to go through one’s entire life without letting people in. Gold and Mal would do anything for each other, that was clear to see, and Belle felt a pang of jealousy, wishing that she had a deep friendship like that, one that could completely transcend the huge challenges thrown at it.

Maybe in a way, Mal was acting out of guilt, knowing that she should have been on that assignment with Gold and either shared in his pain and suffering or been able to prevent it, and she felt that she owed it to him now to make sure that the same thing didn’t happen again now that she was in a position to stop it. They all were, Gold was no longer alone, and perhaps it was time to really let him know that.

_“We’ll come to the fall back as back up,”_ Emma’s voice said. _“There’s less prep work that can be done in the church but it’s quiet and out of the way and doesn’t have an evening service. Leroy and I will be there. We can run her over if necessary.”_

Gold gave a snort of laughter in spite of himself, and Belle had to laugh too. “Thanks. All right, so we’ll see you later at the church.”

_“I’m going to increase the detail on Zelena and put her on twenty-four hour surveillance, and Rory’s digging into her records,”_ Mal said. _“If there’s anything there to show that she’s on Cora’s payroll then we’ll find it. Mind you, when it comes to bribery, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a living politician in this country who hasn’t taken a bribe from Cora to ensure that something that goes against her little plans doesn’t succeed, and I can see Zelena’s department being one that she will have had extensive contact with over the years. I hate to ask, Gold, but I have to – do you know where you were imprisoned when you were first taken? It’s never been properly recorded.”_

Gold grimaced. “Yes, I wasn’t the most co-operative of repatriated agents. You know the Mines?”

The Mines was a deserted area of barren farmland located on the border between Avalon and Misthaven, where the only people who could be seen for miles around were the guards patrolling along each side of the fence where the crossing points were. People had once thought that there was a gold seam beneath the dusty ground, and the area had been mined extensively to no avail, to the point where subsidence and accidents were so common that all the tunnels had been filled in.

_“Yes… Shit, we always thought that there was some kind of a rebel stronghold somewhere around there where they made all the dangerous experimental stuff that got them the edge over the Misthaven army. They got some of the tunnels open?”_

“Exactly. I’m pretty sure that’s where I was for the first few months.”

_“Christ…”_ They heard Mal give a long sigh over the comms link. _“Well, as much information about her past as we can get is useful to help us work out what she’s doing in the present. Here’s hoping she had a legitimate reason to be in the hotel at exactly the same time as you were.”_

_“Yes, when you put it in those terms it’s not exactly encouraging,”_ Emma said dryly. “ _At any rate, we’ll see what we can work out here, and we’ll see you later.”_

The call cut off and Belle stowed the laptop again. Gold had wandered over to the minibar, opening a bottle of soda water and pouring a glass, drinking it slowly and rolling his neck.

“Are you…” Belle began, but Gold shook his head.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “Just… let’s focus on something else and let me put it as far to the back of my mind as I can. No, I’m not all right. I don’t think I’ll ever be all right again, but that’s not something that anyone can help with at the moment, and wallowing in self-pity isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

Belle nodded. “I understand. And I’m sorry for everything that you’ve been through.”

He gave a wan smile. “That does mean a lot, Belle. So…” He swirled the water in his glass, the room falling so silent that Belle could hear the bubbles fizzing. “What are we going to do about Daniel? Turned out it was option six after all, none of the above. She was trying to get him out herself.”

“Well, it certainly doesn’t look like he’s a security threat,” Belle said. “And if he is reporting anything back to Cora then he doesn’t have all the information so we’re still one step ahead. Part of me’s tempted to leave him here and let him make his own way over to us, but at the same time, I’m concerned that it might compromise Regina’s security in her new home if she’s constantly communicating with Daniel in order to be reunited. Something needs to be done. I’m not above staging kidnap, but that could prove even more problematic. The best extractions are always when people just disappear quietly.”

“I think given everything that’s happened so far, quietly is the operative word in this assignment,” Gold agreed. He drained his glass and poured another, shifting his weight and flexing his bad ankle with another grimace. “Still, at least we’ve got a couple of days to think about it. I wonder if Mal’s told Blue yet.”

Belle shrugged. “We could always try bringing him with us but not with us, if you get my drift. We’ll have to mock up a passport and fake ID for Regina, but Daniel could travel legitimately at the same time as us.” She shook her head. “No, that would still be too easy for Cora to track if she wanted. Ideally he needs to vanish off the grid at the same time that Regina does.”

“The residency runs safehouses here,” Gold pointed out. “They could take him into their protection until we can get him new ID and get him over to us safely.”

Belle nodded. “That’s certainly looking like the best option.” She glanced at her watch; there was still plenty of time before they had to meet Regina but in the wake of the abandoned meeting she was restless and wanted to be doing something, anything, instead of all this incessant waiting. She’d spent all morning waiting, and now she was having to wait some more.

Gold kicked off his shoes and sat down on the end of the bed, running a hand through his hair. He looked completely done in and Belle felt the same way, although she’d had more sleep.

“You should get some rest,” she said. “We’re going to need our wits about us from here on in.”

Gold snorted. “Tell me about it.” But he didn’t refute her suggestion, lying back on the bed and closely his eyes. He lay very still, and Belle, for want of something to do that wouldn’t disturb him, picked up her book and tried to focus on it. She managed about twenty pages before putting it down again, unable to concentrate. Gold’s suitcase caught the corner of her eye, and she found herself wondering again. The thing was locked of course, and everything remotely valuable was safely stowed inside, but she knew that he had brought with him the confidential file that Blue had given her to use as leverage, and not for the first time, she was desperately curious to find out what it was. She was almost certain that it was related to the family he’d had before his imprisonment, and she wondered where they were now. Did they even realise that Gold was still alive and, although not well, thriving and fighting despite all the wrongs that had been done to him? Was he fighting for his chance to get back to them or for something else?

And then there was Regina, whom he was so determined to protect, but moreover to rescue from Cora. From what she knew of Cora, the very fact that she existed was enough for anyone to want to protect a vulnerable person living under her roof, but for Gold this mission seemed personal.

Belle went over to her own luggage and extracted the _Foresight_ file. She’d brought as much information with her as she feasibly could, anything that could possibly have a bearing on their current assignment.

_Foresight_ should have been a simple assignment, really. The agency had received an offer of intelligence from Cora in much the same way that they had received the offer from Regina, and Gold had been despatched to find Cora and extract her, or if possible, turn her. Cora was married to Henry Mills, son of Xavier Mills, owner of Mills Corp and the most powerful man in the then-newly independent Avalon. She had access to a positive treasure trove of information about the way the country worked and the web of corruption that kept it going. Everything that she had produced up until that point had been diamond dust, and Gold had been anticipating a very easy extraction. Cora had more freedom than Regina did now, it would not have been too hard to get her out of the country.

Except for the one small fact that Cora didn’t actually want to leave the country. What Cora wanted was to gain control of her husband and father-in-law’s business empire in a way that would leave her firmly assured of their assets for a long time to come. Setting up a foreign intelligence agency for the murders she had committed in order to ascend to her current lofty position of power seemed to be the perfect way to go about that.

Gold had been blown and thrown in the Mines, the Agency blamed for causing civil unrest in Avalon by assassinating two highly important industrial and political figures, and despite everyone’s (well, everyone except Blue, it seemed) best efforts, the assignment had been an unmitigated disaster, stamped FUBAR and put away in a cupboard to be used as a hushed example to the younger generations. Cora had wept and wailed and made martyrs of the family she had slaughtered, and vowed to keep up the good work that they had started in their name. The good work that included bankrolling terrorism organisations the world over. She had remained untouchable ever since, and it made Belle’s hackles raise to think about her. If she ever met the woman she’d be hard pressed not to punch her in the face in retaliation for all the pain she had caused throughout the years, not least of all to Gold.

Belle glanced over at him. He seemed peaceful in sleep now, relaxed in a way she had never seen him before when he had been awake. She would have to wake him soon in order to be ready to go to the meet, but it really seemed a shame to do so when this was the only respite from the current nightmare he was living. She went over, crouching beside the bed.

“Gold?” she began softly. “Gold, we need to go soon.”

A strand of his mussed hair had fallen into his face and Belle reached across to brush it away, but before she could make contact, Gold’s hand grabbed her wrist and his eyes shot open.

“Sorry,” he said, blinking once and letting go of her. “Old habits die hard.”

Belle shrugged. “Can’t blame you for having instincts. It’s almost time to go.”

“Yes.” Gold nodded and found his shoes and gun again. “Yes, let’s go and get this over and done with.”

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Ten**

The Mother of Mercy chapel was on the outskirts of the city, but not too far out that driving up to it would look strange. Although the majority of people who believed chose to go to the places of worship further in, Mother of Mercy had a small, stalwart congregation, and was home to Avalon’s only order of nuns. The Sisters of Mercy had taken in and helped rehouse hundreds of people who had been left homeless during the civil war, and for this reason the Mother of Mercy chapel was considered by some to be Avalon’s main tourist attraction. Well, it would have been, had Avalon had any tourists, Belle reflected as the taxi rumbled up the bumpy roads towards the church. The driver was a chatty lady; both were characteristics that were unusual in Avalonian taxi drivers, and she seemed desperate to engage them in conversation.

“So what brings you out here then?” she asked. “Not many people leave the city centre.”

“We’re in Avalon on business,” Belle replied. Gold had listened to one run-on sentence from the woman and given Belle a look that said ‘right, you can handle this one’. “We’ve heard so much about the Sisters of Mercy and since we had some spare time, we decided to go and see the chapel.”

“Oh, it is beautiful,” the driver said. “It managed to escape the war almost completely undamaged. It’s not as grand as the cathedral obviously, but at least there aren’t any bullet holes in the stained glass and you don’t have to wear five layers of scarves when you go in for communion during the winter…”

She continued to babble on until they reached the chapel, whereupon she gave them her card and told them that her name was Anna and she was working till ten if they wanted a lift back. Gold waited until the taxi was out of sight before burying his face in his hands and giving a suppressed moan of frustration.

“Do you think she has an off-switch?” he asked his palms, and Belle laughed.

“Probably not, but at least she was doing all the talking and not trying to get a load of incriminating evidence out of us.”

They made their way towards the church, and Belle could see Leroy standing in the foyer talking to a young nun. She was dressed primly all in various shades of navy and for a moment, Belle was reminded of Agent Blue. Leroy caught sight of them and waved them over.

“This is Sister Astrid,” he said as the nun shook hands with them both. “She’s been a contact of ours here at Mother of Mercy for a few years now.”

“Yes. Kevin’s been a great friend to the chapel.” Although it was standard practice never to give your real name to the assets you worked with so that you could have full deniability if the need arose, Belle still had to smile at the fact Leroy had chosen to call himself Kevin for Astrid. “We don’t really get involved in anything,” she added quickly, throwing her hands up as if at gunpoint, trying to convince them that she wasn’t any kind of threat. “We just make sure that the chapel stays safe so that Kevin can use it for meetings and… stuff.” She leaned in a little conspiratorially. “He’s never told me what you really do.”

“Well, you know, it’s on a need to know basis, Sister,” Leroy said. He’d gone a little bit pink and the blush was spreading from his cheeks and over the top of his bald head. “We can’t have any of you ladies getting hurt as a result. We’re only doing it to protect you, you know.”

“I know, Kevin. It’s very sweet of you.” She patted his arm affectionately and indicated for Belle and Gold to follow her into the chapel. “I’ve done this for Kevin and his colleagues before,” she explained as they entered and Leroy took his leave of them. “I know what all the protocols are, and the safety signals are in place.” She indicated the little table with a bowl for donations, which was covered with a blue cloth. “Blue means it’s safe, red means it’s not. You can see the table from the road so you don’t even need to turn in.” She took them into the main chapel. “It’s not as echoey as you might think.”

It was a beautiful little church, and if Belle had been on holiday she would have been taking all kinds of artistic snapshots of it, but it felt wrong to be wasting time appreciating the architecture when something so much more important was about to take place here. The place was deserted apart from a couple of nuns praying at the altar, and Astrid went to join them.

“Ok,” Belle muttered to her mic. “We’re in.”

_“Good to hear_ ,” Emma said in her ear _. “We’re parked up round the back and I’ve got CCTV feeds coming out of my ears here. I take it you met Leroy’s little girlfriend?”_

_“She’s not my girlfriend!”_ Leroy exclaimed over the comms. _“I mean, come on, she’s a nun and I’m a, me, and you know, it would be completely impossible.”_

_“Oh please,_ Kevin _, I’ve seen the way she looks at you,”_ Emma teased.

“Can we keep on topic please?” Gold hissed through his teeth. “If you make me laugh and blow my cover you’ll be incredibly sorry.”

_“Sorry, Gold,”_ Emma said. _“We’ll behave.”_ Obviously not speaking directly into her mic, she added quietly: _“Seriously? You got a bunch of_ nuns _as assets and you got a crush on one of them?”_

_“Shut up,”_ Leroy muttered.

Belle and Gold settled in to wait for Regina, and Belle looked up at the stained glass window above the altar. A security light outside was shining in through the glass casting everything in eerie colours, and although it was a lovely aesthetic, it still made Belle shiver. She never liked meeting in places like this, their emptiness giving the illusion of privacy but their size and many windows giving the impression of being watched. She glanced over at Gold. He was sitting with his hands clasped tightly together, staring at the iconography. Belle wondered if he was praying.

The church clock began to strike six and on cue, Belle’s earpiece came to life.

_“We’ve got movement,”_ Emma said. _“Black range rover with non-standard plates, it’s registered to the Queen. Driver and one passenger.”_

_“It’s Regina and Daniel,”_ Leroy added. _“Looks like Daniel’s staying in the car. Let’s get this show on the road.”_

A few minutes later, Belle heard the clink of coins bouncing into the donation bowl and the quick tap of footsteps coming down the church. She glanced over her shoulder to see Regina coming towards them. All of the nuns had left apart from Astrid, who had taken up a position in the front pew, apparently knitting baby booties but in reality keeping an eye out for anything untoward.

Regina slipped into the pew beside Belle and Gold.

“Is everything all right?” she asked.

Gold nodded. “Yes, everything is under control. We’ve been considering our plans for you and Daniel.” He went on to briefly outline what he and Belle had decided with regard to extracting the both of them, and Regina nodded.

“Thank you.”

“We’ll keep meeting over the next couple of days,” Gold said, going on to give her a time, place and safe signals for their next meeting. “If for any reason it’s not safe to meet then we’ll send you dropbox instructions, there’s a dedicated locker at the central train station.” He passed over a key. “Keep gathering as much intelligence as you can, and we’ll get you out of here. Do you have your phone on you?”

“No, I was told not to bring it, in case it was tracked.”

“Good girl. When you get home, make sure it’s turned off and leave it at home. This is a burner,” he added, giving her a cheap cell from the stash of burners Mal had at the residency. “If you need to make calls, use this phone and delete the history afterwards. This is the number we will use to contact you, if we need to, but it will only be in an emergency. If you need to contact us in an emergency, this is the number to use,” Gold said, handing her a post-it note. “Memorise it, don’t write it down anywhere.”

Regina spent a few minutes reading the number over and over to memorise it and handed the post-it back. “Ok, I’ve got it.”

“Good. Other than that, just keep going about your life as normal, and we’ll do everything that needs to be done behind the scenes. The only other advice I can give is to try not to give your mother any cause to suspect you.”

Regina smiled. “Thank you so much.” She paused. “I know it can’t be easy for you, and I’m sorry that you had to come back here, but… I can’t regret asking you to come. You’re just what I expected you to be. Do you understand that?”

Gold gave a sad smile. “Yes, that I can well understand. Now you’re going to be missed, so I’d get going if I were you.”

She thanked him again and left them, and Gold let out a long sigh, running a hand through his hair as he watched her rush back down the aisle to the entrance.

“Gold,” he muttered under his breath, “you goddamn fool.”

They were the same words that he had murmured back in Lochdubh when they had first confronted him with a view to recruiting him for the job, and once again, Belle had to wonder at the significance. It wasn’t unheard of for agents to get emotionally invested in their assignments, especially those ones that they had been attached to a long time, and Belle really wanted to know what Gold’s stake in this particular mission was. Something went deeper than his lost son and his bitter enmity with Blue about the whole thing.

_“Regina and Daniel have gone,”_ Leroy said in her ear, bringing her back to the present.

Gold and Belle stood and left the church, saying their goodbyes to Astrid. Gold’s limp was more pronounced as they made their way around the back of the building to where the generic white van was parked up. He seemed to have aged in the half an hour or so that they had spent in the church, being back in the game after so long was taking its toll on him, but there was a determination in his stance. He was going to see this through to the end or he was going to die trying. Leroy opened the back of the van and helped the two of them into it.

“Everything according to plan?” Emma asked, taking off her headphones and half-turning away from her monitors.

“Yes,” Gold said. “Well, apart from this morning’s little mishap. But this meet went as it should have done.”

“Yeah, about that.” Emma pulled up a bunch of reports on her screen. “We’ve not had any suspicious activity from Zelena so far, her tails are all reporting situation normal but we’ve got her on a 24/7 watch detail now. Apparently her meeting at the hotel was a legit one so there’s no reason to suspect that she was looking out for you, but obviously when you work in this service for as long as we have, you know that legit tends to take on an entirely different meaning.”

“Indeed,” Gold said dryly. “What about her past?”

Leroy shook his head. “We’ve got nothing showing any red flags at the moment,” he said. “But Rory and Mal are having some trouble getting into her files, they’re locked down pretty tight on the government servers and Mal’s throwing everything she can at them, but there’s a limit to what we can do before someone notices that we’re essentially trying to hack them. Rory’s in the middle of building some new software but it’s going to take a little time. Poor girl’s going to be on the coffee and the pro-plus all night. I’d offer to help, but computers don’t speak my language.”

“You’re telling me,” Emma said. “I’m amazed you managed to function before Rory came out here.”

“I don’t trust modern technology,” Leroy complained. “Gold, back me up here. Everything was a lot simpler before we started relying on virtual reality for everything.”

Gold just laughed. “I don’t know, I find that virtual reality is a much more welcoming option than actual reality on a worryingly regular basis.”

“Well, all in all I think that we can call today a success, even if it took a little longer than expected to achieve it,” Belle said. Despite the concerns that they were now facing regarding Zelena, she wanted to make the most of what they had managed to do. They’d made contact with Regina and made a plan for dealing with the curveball that was Daniel, and all that remained was to keep on enacting it. Just as long as there weren’t any more curveballs coming their way, and as was usually the case with these things, they wouldn’t necessarily know about them until they got smacked in the face. They needed to be vigilant at all costs.

With nothing left to report and their meet with Regina confirmed for the next day, there was no point in Belle and Gold hanging around in the van with Leroy and Emma any longer, and they got out, making their way down the driveway. Gold called them a cab from a company that Anna did not work for, and they stood in the shadows waiting for it, out of sight of the bright white security lights that surrounded the chapel. In a way Belle was sad to be leaving a place of such tranquillity and respite. It had installed a sense of calm in her, and the thought of going back into the dreary bustle of the busy city put her on edge. In the end though, even Mother of Mercy wasn’t safe from the influence of their double lives. The nuns here were as much a part of the great system of espionage as any of the rest of them were, and they had far less protection than the resident agents had.

Almost unconsciously, Belle reached out for Gold’s hand. It was hard to see him in the inky blackness that surrounded the stark light, and she needed the reassurance that he was still there. He took her fingers, squeezing gently and giving her troubled soul the comfort that only the human touch can give. She hoped that he was taking some measure of solace from it too, lord knows he needed it after today’s events. Her mind came full circle back to Regina and the words from the shop.

“Gold,” she began, but discussing something so delicate and personal out here in the open was against every protocol and procedure her brain could care to throw at her.

“Yes?”

“Never mind. I’ll ask you when we get back to the hotel.”

“Ok.” His voice was calm, affable, and Belle would have given anything to know what he was thinking. He still had not let go of her hand, and Belle just enjoyed the warmth of his fingers around hers. For the first time, she found herself thinking beyond their assignment. Once they got back to the UK with Regina and they’d managed to get Daniel out, what would happen then? She would file her paperwork and get another assignment. Gold would go back to his antiques in Scotland. He was only her colleague and team-mate for this one assignment, and after that they would be free to fraternise as much as they wished. Provided, of course, that Gold would want to fraternise with her after all this was over. She’d been the one to bring Avalon back into his life, after all, and she wouldn’t be surprised if he never wanted to see her again after that. Besides, she had no indication that her burgeoning attraction to him was in any way returned. All she had were the little smiles he had given her over the past few days, and the fact that he was not letting go of her hand.

The crunch of gravel under tires and winking headlights heralded the arrival of the taxi and Belle came back to the present. Before either of them could think about the future, they first had to get through the now. Gold drew his hand out of hers and went to open the taxi door for her, and the moment was over. The trip back to the hotel was infinitely quieter than the reverse had been, and Belle was thankful for that. None of the three people in the car said anything, until suddenly Gold sat upright and looked out of the window.

“Bloody hell,” he murmured.

“Something wrong?” Belle asked, feeling the immediate fight or flight response kick in, although how she was going to do either whilst in a moving taxi she didn’t know.

“No… I just can’t believe it’s still there.”

“What is?”

They pulled up at a red light and Gold indicated a restaurant on the road behind them out of the rear window, its flickering neon reading ‘Marco’s Italian Table’. He gave a little smile, and then a laugh, and it was wonderful to see him so happy in the midst of all the worry. Even so, Belle still had to raise an eyebrow.

“It’s an Italian restaurant,” she said.

“Yes, yes it is,” Gold said. “I’ll explain later. I’m just extremely happy to see it.”

“Marco’s?” the taxi driver said. “You’ve been there before? Best Italian cuisine in all of Avalon, I think. Mind you, it’s not exactly hard.”

“I was there a long time ago,” Gold said. “Does Marco still run the place?”

“No, no, he retired last year. His son does the cooking now. Not as good as Marco but still…” The driver gave a noise of appreciation and fell silent again, but the small smile remained on Gold’s face until they arrived back at the hotel.

The paper wedges in the lock of their room were undisturbed but they swept the place for bugs again and checked all the paperwork was still in tact just in case, and Gold ordered room service for dinner. Waiting for the meal to arrive, he took off his jacket and holster and collapsed onto the sofa, stretching out his bad leg in front of him.

“Marco was one of my assets when I was first working in Avalon,” he said in response to Belle’s unasked question. “He was a close personal friend as well as a valuable intelligence source. Naturally, he was burned as soon as I was captured, and for the past twenty years I’ve been worrying about him, hoping that he was able to get out if he needed to and that his family were provided for. It’s not the kind of thing I could inquire into without attracting attention.” Burned assets were untouchable; once the Agency cut off communication with them then that was it, they were not to be contacted again because the deniability would be broken. “Seeing the place still open today, and knowing that Marco and his son are both all right, well, it’s taken a great weight off my mind.”

Belle smiled. “I’m glad to hear it.”

The food arrived soon after and once they were both comfortable ensconced on the sofa with their plates, Gold turned to Belle again.

“So… what was it that you were going to ask me before the taxi arrived?”

 


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What you've all been waiting for... the contents of Gold's file finally revealed...

**Eleven**

Belle tucked her feet up under her on the sofa, wondering what the best way of approaching the subject would be.

“I was thinking about the way you act around Regina,” she said. “I know it sounds silly, but you almost act as if you’ve met her before. Is it because she reminds you of Cora?”

Gold shook his head.

“No, I think I can safely say that Regina is nothing at all like her mother in anything apart from hair colour and bone structure, and I can assure you that today was the first time that I had ever met her.”

“Ok.” Belle reconsidered her line of questioning. “But still, the way you treat her… It’s different to the way that other people treat possible extractions. I know that we often have to use the soft kid glove approach, especially when they’re in tricky situations like Regina’s, but it’s not really that, because there’s a firmness in the way you handle her.”

“What any asset wants, ultimately, is the reassurance that they’re going to be safe,” Gold said. “That reassurance comes in different forms for different people. For Regina, this is the form that works. You’re no rookie in your field, Belle. You’ve done all of this training and I’m sure you must have done extractions before.”

“Yes, I know.” Belle gave a huff of frustration. “That’s not what I’m getting at. Your approach to Regina is familiarity, which is a perfectly valid approach, but it comes so effortlessly to you and I know from reading all your files that it is not your usual approach, and that familiarity is not something that comes second nature. I’ve been in close quarters with you for a while now and I can pick up on your tells. There is something about Regina that makes her different, and I think that’s why you agreed to help; not because she asked for you but because it’s _her_.”

Gold gave a long sigh. “I think I know what you’re driving at,” he said. “And I think that given our circumstances, you deserve the full story. You could have worked it all out yourself if you’d looked at that bloody confidential file that Blue sent me via you, but you’re lovely and you have honour and integrity so you didn’t peep.” He smiled. “I respect that.”

He put his half-finished plate down on the coffee table and limped over to his luggage, unlocking it and taking out the manila envelope, no longer plastered with confidential tape. He put it down on the sofa between them, but placed a hand over it to stop Belle picking it up.

“First, tell me honestly what you think is going on and why you think I came out here to extract Regina.”

Belle took a deep breath.

“I believe that Regina is your daughter.”

Gold inclined his head and removed his hand from the file, pushing it over the faded cushions towards her.

“In that belief you would be completely justified.”

Belle took the file, but didn’t open it, and Gold nodded towards it.

“Everything you need to know is in there, in black and white,” he said, but Belle shook her head.

“I think I’d rather hear your version of events than some sterile thing that Blue’s had typed up. I know that you were sent to extract Cora twenty years ago, and I know that you were close to her – what Mal said in the residency yesterday evening confirmed that. And the timings line up. It’s just over twenty years since you were here on your assignment, and Regina has just turned twenty.”

Gold nodded.

“You really know most of it all already,” he said. “It’s a good summing up. But yes. I was sent, just over twenty years ago, to extract Cora. Mal and I were already doing a lot of work in Avalon, we were about to set up the residency over here, we had each built up a good network of assets. As I said before, Mal was supposed to have come with me to extract Cora, but at the last moment, Control said that I was to go alone. I knew exactly what he had in mind, and at the time, I didn’t think anything of it, other than to wonder why I couldn’t have Mal as back-up. In a word, sex. I was to get close to Cora by any means necessary, up to and including getting her into bed.” He gave a self-deprecating snort. “Before I went out there, I’d just had my divorce finalised and I was on a very entertaining rebound period. It didn’t make a lot of difference to me. She was beautiful in that cold, dangerous way, and she was another man’s wife, and at the time that appealed because my own wife had run off with another man, so a primal part of me thought it was a weird kind of karmic payback that I’d then run off with someone else’s.” He sighed, and caught Belle’s expression, raising an eyebrow. Belle didn’t know what her facial features were doing, but she was evidently expressing some kind of disapproval.

“I regret the train of thought that went along with my actions,” Gold said coolly, “but I do not regret the actions themselves, except in as much as they ultimately led me to prison, but that could probably be said of the entire assignment whether I’d slept with her or not.”

“I’m not chastising you,” Belle said hastily. “I’m just trying to understand what it must be like to be in that position.”

“Well, just take a moment to think about it. If there was something that you wanted desperately, some piece of intelligence that would prove such a boon, you would do anything in your power to get it, wouldn’t you? You’d use any and every trick up your sleeve, including your body. Are you telling me you’ve never used your body to your advantage?”

Belle thought about it, sipping her juice.

“I’ve never slept with anyone for intel,” she said. “But yes, I have taken advantage of low cut tops and mini-skirts and the male gaze before now.”

“It’s on the same spectrum in a way,” Gold said. “It’s just higher up the scale. Some people aren’t comfortable with it. I don’t know that I would be now, but then, I’m a bit older and a lot less attractive than I was back then.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Belle said. “Older yes, obviously, twenty years have passed. But not necessarily less attractive.”

He raised his eyebrows again and gave a snort of laughter into his water glass. “I’ve got a limp and I’m going grey.”

“Silver foxes can be very sexy,” Belle said, and in spite of herself she had to giggle. “I’m beginning to think there might be something in this orange juice.” She knew that there wasn’t, it was a sealed bottle that she’d opened and poured herself, but all the same, she couldn’t remember ever feeling this relaxed in the middle of an assignment. Well, not relaxed, that was definitely the wrong word. Everything was still up in the air and fraught with tension and until she’d seen Zelena at the bottom of a well where she couldn’t throw any spanners into the works then Belle would not relax. But… vaguely at ease, and able to laugh. Considering the bleak subject matter that they were talking about, it was good to laugh for a moment before they returned to talking about the events of Foresight all those years ago and she was brought back down to earth with a jolt.

The jolt came a little sooner than expected.

“Sexy silver foxes aside, what’s under the clothes is not a pretty sight,” Gold continued, his tone matter of fact but his expression somewhat self-deprecating. Belle’s stomach churned uncomfortably, remembering the scars.

“I wouldn’t say that,” she said.

“Belle, you haven’t seen…”

Belle cut him off. “I have. You left the bathroom door open when you were shaving this morning, remember? I got a peek in the mirror.”

Gold rubbed a hand over his face. “Fuck,” he muttered.

“There’s nothing ugly about your scarring,” Belle said. “It just shows all that you’ve survived.”

“Doc said that,” Gold mused. ‘Doc’ Forrest had been the chief medical officer for the House for as long as Belle could remember; certainly as long as Granny had been there “That was back when they were fresher and I had less tattoos to cover them up. I had a few already, you don’t really go to prison and come out unmarked. He said that there was no shame in them, and that I ought to be proud of having survived what I’d gone through, not ashamed of everything that I had gone through to cause them.”

“You obviously didn’t believe him then,” Belle remarked.

“Well, of course I didn’t,” Gold said. “I was, as Granny will tell you, the most bolshy, contrary and bloody-minded person in the country at that point and I didn’t believe anything that anyone told me. Especially anyone in the service. Apart from Granny. She always gave as good as she got and she did keep me stocked up in booze throughout my recovery. And it’s Doc’s job to make people feel better.”

“Well, I’m no doctor and I’m saying exactly the same thing.” She paused. She’d wondered if he had tattoos and she’d seen some of the evidence this morning, and she wanted to delve further into it, ask more about the meanings. She decided against it. They were already treading a very fine line.

“Let’s not talk about it anymore, please.” Gold gave her a pleading look. “I was telling you about _Foresight_ and Cora and Regina, not me.”

Belle nodded. “Of course. Go ahead.”

Gold took a moment to collect himself and he continued.

“Well, I came out here and I started to work my way into Cora’s life. We knew that she had something to trade, she had already told us as much, but we wanted her to give it to us on our terms. We wanted to turn her. So I became her best friend. I became her solace from a loveless marriage and a tyrant father-in-law who looked down on her common roots – Henry and Xavier Mills are descended from the Misthaven royal line – and saw her only as a vessel to carry his grandchild and future heir.” He gave a bark of sarcastic laughter. “Oh, the tales she span me. It was only later that I realised just how much I’d been led up the garden path, and that although Xavier was indeed a terrifying specimen, he had more respect for Cora and her vicious business acumen than he did for his own son. And Henry, who had been presented to me as cruel and cold with no regard for his wife at all was a somewhat weak-willed man who would never hurt a fly. All the terrible things that she told me he’d done to her, she’d done to him instead. But she fed me these tales, and I had far less intelligence at my fingertips in those days; my networks weren’t as well established and weren’t working in the correct circles. Up until we’d had the offer of intel from Cora we’d mainly been focussed on the various rebel militias in Avalon that had sprung up during the war of independence and hadn’t quite quietened down, still claiming responsibility for bombings throughout Misthaven and indeed beyond. So she could tell me pretty much anything she wanted and because the intelligence that she was giving me was checking out as triple-A quality, naturally I assumed that everything else she was telling me had to be true as well.”

Gold gave a long sigh again and refilled his glass. “Are you sure I can’t have a whiskey?”

“I’ll buy you a crate of Glenfiddich when we get out of here,” Belle promised.

“You know I’ll hold you to that.”

“I’d expect nothing less.”

Gold shook his head in good-natured disbelief and continued his tale.

“In the end, we ended up in bed together as the natural conclusion to what we’d been carrying on. One thing led to another and we got sloppy.” He cringed. “Christ, talk about the wrong word. Complacent, that’s a better one. Anyway, not long after that, Cora put her master plan into action and bam. I was set up, the Avalon police caught me and threw me in the Mines, Blue and the Agency sold me down the river and Cora came to visit, gloating about how she’d just achieved everything she ever wanted and thank you for all my help but now she was going to leave me to rot.” He paused. “I noticed she was expecting then but wasn’t really in the right frame of mind for it to register. It was only after I got out and I was reading up on everything that had happened whilst I’d been inside, trying desperately to find out if Marco and the others were all right. That was when I saw about Regina and put two and two together. I’ve been wondering about her ever since.”

He nodded towards the file, and Belle opened it. Within, there were a few pictures of Regina taken at various points during her lifetime, and a few pages of medical paperwork filched from the Avalon central medical records database, showing all her statistics in plain numbers. There were also the results of a DNA test that had been undertaken shortly after Gold’s return to civilisation, confirming that Regina was indeed his daughter.

“I’d already failed one of my children,” Gold said softly. “As soon as Blue gave you that file, she knew that I would come with you, because she knew that I wouldn’t fail another. I got to watch Bae grow up and I was part of his life whilst he was a boy, but then I lost him before he became an adult. I was denied the chance to be part of Regina’s life whilst she was young, and I can’t lose her now that she’s an adult. Not now that this opportunity has presented itself to me.”

Belle nodded.

“I understand,” she said. “It explains everything.” His manner with Regina, the paternal fondness he showed for her, it was all genuine. It explained his vehemence about not turning her but extracting her fully and letting her live out her days in peace in a safe place. Why he’d said he’d set her up in a remote corner of Scotland – perhaps a remote corner like Lochdubh where he could make sure that she was safe. It explained why he was so committed to this assignment despite the pain, both mental and physical, that it was causing him.

And it also explained how come Regina had asked for him to be the one to come and get her.

“I take it that Regina knows?” Belle said.

Gold nodded. “As you know we haven’t exactly discussed the subject openly. But I think she knows. I can’t think of any other reason why she would want me over anyone else, especially knowing as she does my history with her mother, and her mother’s history with our agency. That’s not something that Cora would ever attempt to hide from Regina; her victory over us is something that she’s terribly proud of and likes to flaunt. People like us are weak, in Cora’s eyes, and people like her are made to rule over us. It’s something that she would have passed onto her daughter. The engagement to Leo White proves it. You don’t marry for love if you’re Cora or her daughter. You marry for power and once you’ve got the power you get someone to dispatch the husband for you.”

“Regina doesn’t subscribe to the theory though.”

“No, which is something I’m very grateful for. There’s been enough external influence in her life not to allow Cora’s twisted philosophy to take hold, and now she has Daniel to whom she’s clinging as much as she can as a lifeline. All I can do now is hope that we can get her out and she has some chance of a better life without her mother’s toxic influence, in a place where she’s loved and is free to love in return.”

It was an eloquent and beautiful philosophy, and Belle took a moment to let it sink in before she closed the file and returned it to Gold.

“I’m sure we’ll succeed. I don’t think it’s ever too late to bond with your children.”

“I hope not.” Gold sighed, and Belle worried her bottom lip between her teeth, wondering how, or if, she should approach her next question.

“I’ll understand if you don’t want to discuss it,” she began eventually, “but you mentioned losing your son. May I ask what happened?”

Gold looked at her confused for a moment, and then laughed out loud. Belle was startled by this reaction and wondered if she’d completely misunderstood something.

“Oh Fae, my dear,” Gold said. “No wonder you didn’t want that put in the case file. Oh, you know what you did, for the greater good, to try and cover your tracks when you hung me out to dry.”

“Gold?” Belle hedged. She was remembering the conversation between Gold and Blue back in headquarters when he had arrived so unceremoniously and put the cat among the pigeons. The cryptic exchange they’d had, about what Blue knew Gold wanted and what was impossible and what she’d done for the greater good. At the time and on reading the case file she’d assumed it related to the two extra years he’d spent in prison before they’d managed to swap him back, two years spent there ultimately on Blue’s orders. Now she was not so sure.

Gold turned back to Belle. “When I returned from Avalon, the first thing I wanted to do was see my son. Well, within reason. I wanted a good cup of tea and a bath and a bottle of whiskey, but that’s beside the point. I wanted to see my son, whom I hadn’t seen in six years and to whom I had no idea what kind of tale had been spun as to my disappearance, whether he knew I had been in prison in Avalon or not. Blue, however, informed me that in keeping with protocol, Bae and his mother and step-father had been placed in a protection program after I had been captured lest I reveal something about their location under torture and put them in danger. They’d been given entirely new identities. I wasn’t at all surprised by this and I was even grateful to Blue for organising it.”

“Something bad must have happened.”

“Blue refused to let me know the new identities,” Gold said coolly. “She said that whilst I was still under observation, I couldn’t know the information.”

After his release from the House following repatriation, Gold had been kept under observation for three years before he was no longer deemed potentially dangerous. Belle did the maths quickly, Bae would have been twenty-three at the time.

“And after observation?” she pressed.

“Once my observation period was up, I spoke to Blue again. Blue said that it would be impossible for me to see my son, because in the interest of his safety, when I had been blown, they had told him that I had been killed.”

Belle felt her jaw drop. “What?”

“The language I used was slightly stronger than that, but my reaction was very similar to yours.” Gold’s smile was bitter.

“Surely you could have looked him up anyway,” Belle said. “There was nothing stopping you from having the information.”

“I know there wasn’t,” Gold said. “But by the time I had digested the news that my family thought I was dead, I decided that I couldn’t go through with it. By that point I hadn’t been a part of Bae’s life for almost ten years. He thought I was dead, he had mourned me and gone on with his life. He was an adult, he might have a family of his own. I couldn’t in all good faith suddenly walk back into his life. Not in the state I was then, the state I’m still in now. Broken and battered and just a shadow of the man I was before. I couldn’t inflict that on Bae’s new life. So I gave my son up for lost and I retreated into my antique shop. Until you and Agent Swan arrived, and presented me with a second chance wrapped up in this deadly coating.”

Belle didn’t have the right words to express her sympathy in that moment. Everything that she could come up with in her mind sounded wrong and clichéd. She couldn’t begin to be able to know what Gold had been through, and the agony of having something to cling to throughout his torture, the thought of seeing his son again, only for it to be ripped away from him at the end, well, she couldn’t fathom it.

So she didn’t speak, but instead just reached across the sofa and took Gold’s hand in hers, squeezing gently.

He looked up at her, and she could see the understanding and gratitude in his eyes. After a moment, he brought her hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles like a knight of old.

“Thank you, Belle,” he said softly. “Thank you.”

 


	12. Chapter 12

**Twelve**

It was still dark outside when Belle work to the sound of her phone beeping steadily on the nightstand beside her. She grabbed the device and saw by its light that it had just gone half past six. 

The persistent beeping was accompanied by a flashing, but there was no other indication of someone trying to call her or a new message. Belle gulped; she knew what this meant. It was a flash message from the residency. Whilst flashes between residencies and headquarters were encrypted messages and contained some idea of the problem and the reason for the urgency, flashes sent to agents out in the field were by necessity brief and clipped to avoid interception, telling the agent to set up a secure line to the residency or get there in person as soon as possible. The one thing that stopped her panicking completely was that they were not in any kind of immediate danger. If they were, then someone would have called them, because by the point when they were in danger, using secure lines and encryption was completely redundant.

“What’s happened?” Gold asked beside her. The beeping had obviously woken him as well and she could see the worry in his face through the gloom. Belle turned off the phone before scrambling out of bed to get her laptop. 

“We’ve had a flash from the residency, something’s happened.” She put in her earpiece and Gold did the same, switching on the bedside lamp to give them the minimum amount of light they needed to work. He grabbed his cane, limping over to the sofa. 

“Mal, what’s happened?” Belle asked as soon as the call connected. 

_ “We think we’ve been compromised,” _ Mal said.  _ “We have to abort and do a crash extraction as soon as possible, it’s not safe for you or Regina to stay here any longer. Killian, the asset we were using as a messenger pigeon between us and Regina, has failed to check in and we’ve got serious reason to believe that Zelena and Cora are working together.” _

Gold swore. “How much did Killian know, are you safe at the residency?”

_ “Yes, we should be all right. I’m Killian’s handler and most of the work related to Regina’s extraction was done by dropbox rather than in person. All the same, we need to get you two and Regina to a safehouse as soon as possible, I want all three of you out of the country within twenty-four hours, then we can go about performing damage limitation.” _

“What grade asset is Killian?” Belle asked. 

_ “Single-A. He doesn’t provide really valuable intel but his position means he’s close to Cora and Regina and we can use him in the way we have done. He doesn’t have much on us so we’re fairly protected; the most dangerous information he has is all related to Regina’s extraction. If he was doubling for Cora all along or if she’s just found him out and is about to set Zelena to work on him, then the only things he can really give her are related to you.” _

“Where do you think his loyalties lie?” Gold sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. 

_ “Well up until five o’clock this morning I would have said with us; his family were all killed in the war of independence and most of them killed by things that Mills Corp had manufactured. Now I’m not so sure. Either way, we have to now assume that everything he knows, Cora now knows. Surveillance shows that Zelena arrived at the Mills estate earlier this morning. I’ve got Rory and a bunch of other assets monitoring all our dropboxes and signal points for anything untoward. All we can do is pray that Regina keeps her head and doesn’t lead them straight to you.” _

_ “There’s always the slim hope that Killian will turn up paralytic drunk under a bridge somewhere _ ,” Leroy muttered in the background, and Belle could almost hear Mal rolling her eyes. 

_ “Belle’s got all the safehouse details, you need to leave as soon as possible and get over there. Emma’s on her way, she’ll meet you there. We’ll take care of getting Regina to you.” _

“Copy. We’ll get to the safehouse and await further instruction.”

_ “Copy. Oh, and Belle, Rum?”  _ There was a pause.  _ “Good luck.” _

The line dropped and Belle switched her laptop off, looking at the black screen for a few long moments before bursting into action, knowing that every moment spent reeling from what had just happened was another moment spent sitting waiting for the potential dangers to find them. The knowledge that Zelena was working with Cora sent a chill down her spine; it was looking even less likely that her appearance in the hotel restaurant the previous afternoon had been a coincidence. Killian had been the one to communicate the details of the meeting to Regina, and now it was probable that he had communicated them to Cora as well. At least Belle could take heart from the fact that there were things that Regina knew that Killian didn’t, and their entire operation had not been blown. Once that initial meeting had been set up and they were in direct contact with Regina, they had not needed to pass any further information on via Killian. 

All the same, they could never be too careful. 

They got dressed and packed up the room quickly, sweeping it thoroughly to make sure that no trace remained. There was no longer time for second guessing or musings, like the previous evening had been taken up with. It was less than twelve hours ago that Belle and Gold had sat on the sofa discussing Regina’s parentage and Bae’s loss. It felt like a lifetime ago; so much had happened overnight. 

They didn’t check out, just dropping the keys in at reception, and the very tired-looking receptionist gave them no mind as they left the building with their luggage despite being booked in to the hotel for another couple of days. It wasn’t exactly unheard of for people to keep rooms available whilst travelling elsewhere for a night or two, especially people in Avalon on delicate business with Mills Corp. If you were liked, you’d likely be invited to stay at the estate out of town for a day, to get the deal signed and sealed and allow Cora to intimidate with her wealth and sheer power, letting you know just what you were getting into bed with when you signed on the dotted line. 

The dawn was beginning to break as they walked along the almost empty streets to get to the safehouse. Those few people that they did pass had their heads down, paying them no mind as they hurried along to get to their destinations in the freezing cold morning, but Belle and Gold were both alert, keeping an eye out for anything remotely malicious, anyone tailing them. On the one hand, the main threat that they faced – Cora – was civilian. On the other hand, Cora knew a hell of a lot about how the intelligence service worked, and she had more than enough manpower at her fingertips to be able to keep them under surveillance. On yet another hand, Cora also had more than enough friends in high places within the corrupt government to be able to pull a few strings and get Avalon’s own secret service on her side. 

So far, so good. They reached the street which the safehouse lay on and stood in the shadowy doorway of the building opposite, scoping the situation. No-one had followed them down the narrow road. The house itself was dark, and Belle didn’t know whether or not to take that as a good sign. Still, the locations of safehouses were always given out on a need to know basis, and this was something that Killian didn’t need to know. 

“What’s the safety signal?” Gold asked, nodding towards the house.

“Window fan,” Belle said, indicating the old-fashioned extractor fan on second floor of the house, set into the frosted glass of a bathroom window. “Open good, closed bad.”

The fan was open, and after waiting another couple of minutes to ensure that they were alone, Belle and Gold crossed over the road and knocked sharply on the door. 

Emma opened it and ushered them inside. Once the door was bolted firmly behind them, she threw her arms around Belle in an uncharacteristic display of affection. 

“I’m so glad you’re ok,” she said. “The residency’s on red alert and it’s been like a war bunker in there all night. But you’re both here and you’re both ok.”

She led them through into the back of the house, where a young man was sitting watching a muted television. As Belle entered she realised that it was not showing any kind of program but a steady stream of CCTV images. 

“Belle, Gold, this is Graham, he operates the safehouse.”

“Pleased to meet you.” The man shook hands with them both before going back to his CCTV footage, there were various binoculars and scopes scattered on the floor around him. “I tell everyone I’m a keen bird watcher,” he added dryly as Belle opened her mouth to comment on the amount of equipment he had amassed. “The street’s still clear, I’ll keep an eye out for Regina and Daniel. And anyone else who might come along.”

“All we can do for the moment is wait and pray,” Emma said. “This is the most hidden place that the residency has. Rory’s in charge of making sure that Regina gets here. I brought as much stuff as I thought we’d need. Thank God that the people who run these twenty-four hour pharmacies are so dead on their feet when six o’clock rolls around that they don’t pay any attention to your purchases. Still, we need to check in with the residency.”

They went upstairs, Emma explaining that Graham lived in the basement of the house and only came up here to take care of all their equipment. A small, windowless boxroom had been converted into a radio room, the communications equipment humming away steadily, and Belle immediately sat down to open a link to the residency. 

_ “You’ve arrived?” _ Mal said. 

“Yes, we’re safe and sound, just waiting for Regina.”

_ “Good. You’re safe with Graham, he’s a wilderness survival expert and he can make anything out of anything.” _

This assessment of the young man’s skills made Belle laugh. “I’m sure that will come in handy, Mal, but is he a good asset?”

_ “Triple-A. The best we’ve got. Well. I hope.”  _ There was an obvious bitterness in Mal’s voice as she spoke.  _ “I’ve been proved wrong before.” _

“We’ve all made worse character judgements, Mal,” Gold said. “Look at me and Cora for God’s sake. Misreading Killian doesn’t mean that you can’t trust anyone that you’ve ever recruited. And you never know, we can hope that he was just terribly unlucky and fell into a trap, and that whilst he might have been blown and that still means the assignment is pretty much fucked, it was not intentional on his part.”

_ “And there’s still hope of him having passed out under a bridge!” _ Leroy called in the background.

_ “Leroy!” _ Mal snapped.  _ “I suppose you’re right, and I’d trust Graham with my life. Since you’re there, do you want to hear about what Rory dug up on Zelena? It took some doing, the poor girl’s even more wired than we are. I had to send her out of the residency before she started bouncing off the walls. I’m worried she might have caffeine poisoning. How much coffee do you have to drink before it’s lethal?” _

“I think it’s something like a hundred cups within four hours,” Belle said. “But go on and tell us about Zelena.”

_ “Well, if I start at the beginning by saying she was at school with Cora, I don’t really know if you need to know anything else. She was born Zelena West, her family were die-hard separatists; Cora’s always been seen as more moderate but we know that Mills Corp were bankrolling a lot of the rebel war effort. She went into the military as soon as she left school; her parents and three older sisters had all fought on the separatist side and she was just continuing the family tradition. She changed her name when she decided to go into government, too much blood on her hands, I suppose.” _

Gold gave a snort of laughter. “Indeed.”

_ “Most of the readily available information about her comes from her time in government since she became respectable, but her connection to Cora goes back years once you really start digging into it.” _ Mal gave a sad sigh.  _ “It’s more than just business bribery, this is definitely a personal connection. You know, the more I think about it, what with her arriving at the hotel at just the moment she did, the more I think that our plans have been known to Cora from the start, and that Killian’s been feeding her the same information he’s been feeding Regina.” _

“Then she’s got a plan,” Gold said grimly. “The information that Regina has been giving us has been as good as diamonds and there’s no way that she would let her get away with handing over that intel unless she had a plan to prevent Regina delivering the final payload – herself and all the knowledge she has. Is there any way that we can vouch for Regina’s safety? How do we know Cora hasn’t just taken her out, or had her taken out?”

_ “Regina’s staying at her mother’s penthouse in town for the week, we’ve got it under observation and there’s been no suspicious activity. Cora’s at the estate outside the city. Regina’s still in tact.” _

“For now,” Gold muttered. “Mind you, Cora would probably want to angle for some kind of set up and that takes more time to plan. She might be biding her time. According to the information Killian had, Regina wouldn’t be leaving until closer to the end of the week, so we might have got the drop on her.”

_ “Well, here’s hoping that we have.” _

They ended the call and the two agents left the room, going back down to where Emma and Graham were monitoring the street outside. 

“It’s still early days,” Graham said. “I probably wouldn’t expect her for another three hours or so. I’d make yourselves comfortable if I were you.” He paused and stood up from his position in front of the TV. “I’ll make tea.”

He moved through the house to the basement flat and Emma sank down onto the arm of the chair he had just vacated, keeping half an eye on the cameras. 

“When you see all these James Bond films and read about all these daring spy adventures, they never really prepare you for the fact that only about two per cent of all intelligence work is the gung-ho chasing down bad guys with guns bit. Fifty per cent is paperwork and the other forty-eight per cent is sitting around waiting for something to happen.”

“Yes, and usually when the thing you’ve been waiting for does happen after three hours of constant vigilance, it only takes about two minutes,” Belle agreed. 

“Or it only takes about two minutes to go wrong and then you’re spending the rest of your career trying to fill in the resulting paperwork from that,” Gold pointed out. 

“You’re really not bolstering my confidence at us being able to pull this off you know, Gold,” Emma said dryly. “I hate crash extractions. There’s so much that can go wrong. I feel like we’re flying by the seat of our pants and holding this entire thing together with sticky back plastic and hair dye.”

“People have been successfully extracted with less,” Gold said. “Although those times usually involved faking death.”

Emma raised an eyebrow. “You know, as fascinating as some of the tales of the agency during your time would be to hear, I think I’m going to pass on that. Hold the fort for a moment?” She left the room and Belle took up monitoring duty. Gold leaned on the wall beside her, peering carefully through the gap between the blind and the window now that the sun had risen.

“Belle,” he began presently. “I didn’t want to say anything whilst Emma was in the room, but now that you know the full story, and the true reason for my being here, I need you to promise something.”

“Of course,” Belle said. “I was the one who dragged you into this mess, Rum. I’m right here alongside you every step of the way.”

“I know.” Gold gave a small smile. “Don’t feel guilty for being the one to bring me in. Think of it more as just a very roundabout way of giving me something to live for again.”

“If we get out of this alive,” Belle muttered. Even though on the face of it their plans, however rapidly altered, were progressing as they should, the fact that Mal had called in a crash extraction and told them that they were compromised was making her very fearful of whether they would ever get back home at all. “But go ahead. What do you need me to promise?”

“If something happens to me, I want you to keep an eye on Regina for me, please.”

“Of course, Rum, you know I will.”

“I just want her to be kept safe from Blue,” Gold said. “We both know what she’s like; and I don’t want her to break Regina just when she’s got the opportunity for a new life. Make sure she doesn’t go on the asset books and that we don’t cut her off without a word. I know it might be difficult; it’s easier for me because at the end of this, I’m no longer bound by contract and I can go back to my life. I can make protecting her my full time job if I need to.”

“Rum, I promise I will look after Regina for you. I can see how much she means to you, both as a person and as a means of redemption for yourself. But just as I shouldn’t feel guilty for having gotten you into this, you shouldn’t feel guilty for having failed Regina for the first twenty years of her life. You didn’t have a choice in the matter, but you do now and you chose to help her when she called out for it. That means a lot to her; she said it herself yesterday in the chapel.”

Belle left her seat and went over to Gold as Emma and Graham brought the tea things in. The first thing that struck her was how tired he looked, like the years of hardship were etched into the lines on his face. The second thing that struck her was just how much she wanted to kiss him in that moment. Hell, in four hours they could all be dead or rotting in the Mines, and the wild, impulsive part of her wanted to just go for it, like in that desperate moment just before the end in all the action films, where the hero goes off to fight the bad guys but comes back for one last kiss for good luck, just in case they never made it back. 

“Tea?” Emma said, bringing Belle out of her little reverie. She nodded and the two of them left the window, going over and picking up mismatched mugs decorated with pictures of wolves. The house settled into an uncomfortable, tense silence. The residency would only contact them if something had gone wrong, so for now they had to assume that no news was good news. Belle took to pacing the landing in order to work off her nervous energy, to the point where Emma had made her take her shoes off because the tapping of her heels was driving everybody else around the bend. 

Graham was on camera duty when two figures appeared on the screen at the end of the street. As they came closer, they were recognisable as Regina and Daniel. The agents watched as they checked their surroundings, looking for tails just as Belle and Gold had done, and then knocked on the door. Graham waited a couple of minutes for safety’s sake before going to let them in. 

Gold took a deep breath. “Showtime.”


	13. Chapter 13

Seeing Regina now, Belle was once more reminded of her comparative youth. No longer dressed in sharp business attire, she still wore her hair braided over a practical jacket and jeans, a large rucksack hanging heavily from her shoulders. She was a legal adult, but she looked every inch the scared child running away from home, and in a way, Belle knew, that was what she was. 

“I brought as much as I could without Mother getting suspicious,” she said quickly once they were all ensconced back in the room with the CCTV monitoring and Graham had gone to fetch a fresh batch of tea. She swung the bag off her back and kneeled on the floor with it, starting to pull out reams of photocopied paperwork and thrust it at the agents, but Gold just crouched beside her and closed a hand over hers, gently pushing the intelligence back into her bag. 

“All in good time,” he said. “For now, we need to focus on you. You’ve done well, Regina. Not many young people would have the courage to do what you’ve done.”

“I just want to get out of here,” Regina pleaded. 

“And we’ll get you out of here, as soon as possible. You have to understand that what we’re doing is dangerous, and not our original plan, but this isn’t the first time that any of us have done this. You can trust me, and Belle, and Emma.”

Regina nodded, and turned to glance over her shoulder at Daniel, who was standing awkwardly in the doorway. He too was dressed casually and carrying a backpack, but Belle could see that beneath his jacket he was still packing a weapon. He waved sheepishly to the agents. 

“Erm, hi.”

Belle took pity on him, giving him a warm smile in return. “Hi, Daniel. You’ll be laying low here for a couple of days until we’ve got Regina out safely and made preparations for you. This is Graham, he looks after the place and he’ll take care of you.”

“Cup of tea?” Graham offered the tray up to Daniel, who took a mug gratefully. 

“There’s not much you can do right now,” Belle continued, “but I’m sure that your presence here is appreciated.”

Regina nodded. “After I got your message I knew that something bad had happened and I thought it would be safer for Daniel if we left together. I didn’t want to leave him at Mother’s mercy.”

“That’s understandable. Now, Gold and Emma will go through your intelligence whilst I’ll get you set up with a new identity. We have an escape passport part-ready for you, but we’re going to need to change your appearance if we want to try and avoid suspicion.” 

Regina nodded and handed her piles of paperwork to Gold, whose balance finally gave out and he sat down on the floor to read and scan the documents. Emma moved from her position in the corner of the room and sat down beside him without further comment, and Belle went towards the door, indicating for Regina to follow her. 

“You’re not going to do anything too drastic, are you?” Regina asked. 

“Well, we’re hardly in a position to be giving you any plastic surgery,” Belle said. “No, the biggest thing that you can do to change your appearance is your hair, so we’re going to cut and dye it.” Emma had brought all the supplies that they would need but had not been entirely comfortable with the idea of being responsible for this part of Regina’s new identity, stating that she really didn’t do ‘girl bonding’ and that was more Belle’s area of expertise. Belle raised an eyebrow at the memory of the conversation. True, she was more interested in clothes and make-up than Emma was, but their line of work and the lives they had chosen meant that she had just as little time or inclination to devote to such pursuits as Emma did. Still, Emma was perfectly capable of doing document management, and as the lead on the mission, Belle felt that it was her duty to stay close to Regina, to build up a rapport with her and gain her trust, the same inherent trust that she had placed in Gold. If that meant the strangest session of ‘girl bonding’ time that Belle had ever participated in, then so be it. Idly she wondered if Mal or Blue had ever had to do anything like this, and how they had handled it. Although extractions usually followed set procedures, every case was different, and in this case, getting Regina relaxed and comfortable in her new identity was key. 

They went into the bathroom and Regina rinsed her hair through in the sink, giving it a melancholic sigh before shrugging and letting Belle come at her with the scissors, the long dark locks shearing neatly into a short bob around her ears. 

“You’re very calm about this,” Belle remarked as she snipped. 

“It’ll grow out,” Regina said. “I’m not the type to get emotional about things like that. A few inches of hair is a small price to pay for freedom.” There was a long pause and Belle continued to work, making sure that despite the lack of professional touch, it didn’t look too much like a hack job.

“I don’t know what impression of me you might have received,” Regina continued eventually, once Belle had put the scissors down and had handed her a sachet of red five-wash hair dye and a pair of rubber gloves. “But I’m not scared. Not really. I’m not scared of doing this and I’m not  _ too _ scared of going up against Mother. I mean, she’s my mother, I think I’m always going to be a bit scared of her. I just keep thinking about what everyone stands to lose if this goes wrong. I’m more worried about Daniel and Gold and you.”

“We’ll be all right,” Belle assured her. “There are enough of us that we can protect ourselves and you. Once we get you out of Avalon, then there’ll be no more need to worry.”

“I know.” She paused. “I don’t want to marry Leo White and I never have, but I feel kind of sorry for his daughter in a way. She was all for me being her new mommy although I’m only twelve years older than her. She’s a sweet kid. I’ll miss her.”

Although it was just chatter to pass the time, Belle allowed herself to feel a little bit of pride her achievement. During their previous two meetings, Regina had addressed herself primarily to Gold and had been wary of Belle, but now she seemed to be opening up a little more. Belle found herself wanting to ask more about Regina’s relationship with Gold, a strange relationship considering neither had met the other before the previous day, but a relationship nonetheless. She decided to refrain, and the two sat in silence for a while as they waited for the hair dye to set. Regina picked at the red-stained gloves. 

“I just want to be normal,” she said eventually. “Is that too much to ask?”

“Never.” Belle smiled. “You’ve been put into an impossible position through no fault of your own. There’s no shame in wanting normality for you and the man you love.”

“Thanks.”

They continued to sit in silence whilst they waited for the dye to take; by the time they’d rinsed it through the bathroom looked as if a triple homicide had taken place in there. 

“If anyone asks, all the towels were red when we got here,” Belle muttered as they wrung out Regina’s hair, trying to dry it as quickly as possible so that they could get her ID photos done without it looking too obvious that she’d recently changed her appearance. Regina gave a snort of laughter, and the slight humour helped to ease the tension in the room and the situation, giving them a little, perhaps forlorn, hope that it was all going to be all right and there was nothing to worry about.

_ “Belle.”  _ Emma’s voice was sharp and urgent through her earpiece. 

“Go ahead, Emma.”

_ “We’ve just seen something on the CCTV footage from the next street over that doesn’t quite add up so I’m going to go and take a look. We’re hoping that it’s nothing, but it can’t hurt to be overly cautious right now. Stay away from the back windows of the house.” _

“Copy.” The bathroom that they were in had no windows at all, as evidenced by the whining fan that was wheezing away in the background and the greenish spots of mould that adhered to the ceiling. All things considered the safehouse was very clean and tidy, but it was clear that it wasn’t a place that was often used. Mal had probably picked their most off-the-grid location in the hope that if Killian had gleaned any of their safehouses, he wouldn’t have got this one. 

“Is everything all right?” Regina asked. 

“Hopefully.” Whilst she didn’t want to worry the younger woman unduly, she also didn’t want to instil her with false confidence, and she needed Regina’s trust more than anything at this moment. If Regina chose now to get cold feet and pull out of the mission, then there was no knowing what might happen. “Emma’s gone to investigate something, so if there is anything amiss, hopefully we can cut it off at the pass.”

“It’s all too real now,” Regina said. “It’s really happening.”

Belle busied herself with the camera; Jefferson had rebuilt it out of an ordinary polaroid camera to take instant passport style shots without the need for a separate printer. The light wasn’t the best, but since Avalon’s electronic infrastructure could be spotty at the best of times, it was a perfectly passable booth quality photograph. They went downstairs again, back into the living room where Gold was scanning through all of Regina’s papers. 

“I have to say that this is probably going to keep your office in work for weeks, Belle,” he said, before adding to Regina: “Your mother is very trusting.”

“Yes.” Regina didn’t sound at all happy about the fact and Gold looked up at her.

“You’re doing the right thing,” he said. “This is going to save countless lives, including your own.”

“I know,” Regina said. “That’s not what I’m worrying about. I’m more concerned with the comparative ease with which I got the information. Nothing has ever been locked to me, I’ve always had almost complete access to everything on the estate and I thought that was because Mother thought I would never betray her like this, but now, with everything that’s happening, I’m not so sure.”

“You think that maybe it was bait?” Graham posited. Regina gave a grim nod. 

“Well, that’s not something that we have the luxury of thinking about right now,” Belle said. “What’s done is done, and no matter what happens, we now have this information on record, locked down at the residency.” She took Regina’s bag from Gold and handed it to the younger woman, exchanging it for the photographs and the half-made escape passport. “You should probably get changed; if anyone notices you’re missing then they’re going to make a note of what you were last seen wearing before you came here, and it will look suspicious if you’re wearing the same thing as in your passport photo.”

Regina nodded and stepped out into the dining room at the back of the house; the curtains were drawn and there were no lights on so there was no chance of being seen from the window. Nevertheless, Belle stayed in the doorway; Regina was the most important part of this mission and sometimes modesty had to take a back seat in the interests of keeping one’s asset alive. 

“Erm, we’ve got a problem!” Graham yelped from the living room. Regina ran out, still buttoning her shirt, and she and Belle re-entered the operations room. 

“What’s up?” Belle asked. 

“Emma’s earpiece just went offline,” Gold explained, looking down at the laptop screen that Graham had open on his lap that was monitoring the radio signals. 

“Could it just be patchy tech?” Daniel asked. There was a note of desperate hope in his voice, and Gold shook his head. 

“These things can dive fifty feet underwater and not lose signal,” he said. “It’s the best tech the agency’s got. Most likely is that she’s sustained a blow to the head that’s knocked it out of her ear or damaged it in some way.” He got to his feet, cursing under his breath, and his hand went to his holster.

“No,” Belle said, stepping into his way. “We need you alive and we all need to get out of here.”

“I am not leaving Emma behind,” Gold snapped. “If she’s in trouble then we have to get her out of it.”

“Our priority is Regina,” Belle said. She didn’t want to leave Emma behind any more than Gold did, but there were other agents on the ground in Avalon who could help her. 

_ “Guys, we’ve got…” _ Emma’s voice crackled into life in Belle’s ear, and a sharp shriek of feedback made both her and Gold flinch.  _ “…out back…” _

The feed cut out again and Gold looked at Belle. 

“We need to leave,” he said flatly. 

It was clear that the safehouse had been compromised in some way, but by whom they had no way of knowing. Emma had said something about the back of the house, but whether she was warning them away from it or telling them it was clear, they had no way of knowing. 

“All right, we really need to move.” Graham got up from the sofa and pushed the oversized piece of furniture back towards the wall as if it weighed nothing at all, pulling back the faded rug that covered the floorboards and revealing a trap door in the floor. As he threw it open, Belle was half-expecting to see a secret passageway leading out to freedom, but the large arsenal of weapons that was cached in the cubby hole under the floor was, she had to admit, just as impressive. Graham pulled out a pistol and a large calibre shotgun, checking both were loaded. “You go down through to my apartment and down into the cellar; go along to the left as far as you can and you’ll come out in the garden of the last house on the terrace; it’s unoccupied, no need to worry about being seen by the owners. I’ll hold them off.”

Belle, who had been checking her own weapon and seeing that Gold had his primed, saw exactly why they needed to move. On the camera feed from the front of the house, a car had pulled into the street and stopped outside the safehouse. Three figures were getting out of it, figures that she recognised as Cora Mills, Zelena West, and Cora’s huge bodyguard turned general heavy for all seasons. She’d tracked them down. Belle wanted to know how on earth it had happened, but there would be time to work that out later, once they were all safely away. 

“Come on.” Gold led the way out of the living room and they made their way through the house to the stairs down to Graham’s apartment, Belle bringing up the rear and Regina and Daniel between them, the young lovers exchanging worried glances every few seconds. Gold grabbed a flashlight off the wall in the kitchen and was about to open the cellar door when a bullet sailed inside, puncturing the kitchen window and lodging in the wall an inch from where Gold’s hand had been. The four escapees were on the floor in a second, and silence reigned for a long moment. No more shots were fired, and Belle felt the bile beginning to rise in her gut. Emma was out there somewhere, and gunshots were being exchanged. She crawled along the floor to the counter below the window, turning on her phone camera and raising it out into the open just a little to see if she could see anything. She saw Emma crouched behind the rickety looking wooden shed, her gun drawn, keeping in cover, but she couldn’t see who had shot at them. On the other side of the narrow room, Gold used his cane to nudge the cellar door open a little way. There were still no shots fired, so whoever had tried to pick them off before had obviously stopped watching them. He inched it open a little further, enough for Regina to wriggle through, and he shone his torch down into the darkness to check that the coast was clear. 

Above them, there was the persistent pounding of someone attempting to break down a wooden door that was reinforced with military grade steel and several locks, and then the deafening blast of someone shooting all the locks with a calibre of weapon a little more high spec than the average handgun. Was it too much to hope for that one of the civilians that lived on the street above had noticed all this drama going on and called the police? True, the police were probably not the best people to help them, and in a country as corrupt as Avalon they were all probably in Cora’s pockets anyway, but anything was better than nothing. She hoped Graham had had time to send out an SOS to the residency, even though that might end up just getting them all killed. 

Gold beckoned to Regina, who shuffled along the floor on hands and knees towards the cellar door; he handed her his flashlight, covering her with his pistol as she inched towards the gap, taking care not to rise above the level of the counter. Belle wished she knew what Emma was doing out there, but at least she had not heard any more shots from outside. 

The thought entered her head too soon as a hail of bullets was exchanged above them. She heard Graham shout out in pain and winged up a prayer that he was all right. There was radio silence on her earpiece; even in these times he knew better than to alert their assailants to their position when they were poised on the brink of escape. Footsteps clattered above them, doors being kicked open. 

“Go!” Gold mouthed to Regina, nudging her towards the cellar door. She reached a hand forward, groping for the step, and in that moment, Belle realised why no-one had shot at the opening door. The sound of a pistol cocking in the inky darkness beyond the cellar door sounded terrifyingly loud and chilling, and Belle heard Gold swear violently under his breath, taking the safety off his own gun and aiming blindly. Before he could shoot, however, Regina screamed as a hand reached out of the dark and grabbed her collar, hauling her to her feet, an arm wrapping around her throat in a chokehold as the other hand pressed the pistol to her temple and the attacker stepped into the light. 

“Sorry, love, no escape that way.” The man was tall with scruffy black hair and beard, a leering smile on his face as Regina struggled against his hold on her, her face almost as red as her freshly dyed hair. 

“Killian,” she gasped. “Why are you doing this?”

“Well, your mother pays significantly better than these losers,” Killian said, nodding towards Gold. “Put the gun down, grandpa, or I blow her bloody head off.”

He was bluffing, at least, Belle thought he was. Surely Cora would want her daughter back alive, why else would she come out here herself rather than just sending the muscle on her payroll? On the other hand, when it came to Cora Mills, nothing could be taken for granted. 

Gold took the magazine out of his gun and tossed the empty pistol towards Killian, glowering at the man. 

“You too, princess.” 

Fuming, Belle did the same, keeping Regina alive at the forefront of her mind, no matter what that might entail. The one thought keeping her going was that he had not disarmed Daniel. The young man wasn’t really in a position to fire, but at least they still had an arsenal up their sleeve.

“Oh my,” Killian said. “You have a lot of explaining to do to Mummy, haven’t you?” 


	14. Chapter 14

**Fourteen**

Using Regina as a hostage and human shield, Killian corralled them all into the living room of Graham’s basement apartment, where Cora, Zelena and the heavy were waiting. There was, Belle noted grimly, no sign of Graham. Cora was sitting primly on the sofa as if she owned the place, looking around her surroundings with distaste, whilst the other two were standing looking menacing. The man was wielding a prototype pistol that Belle had seen in conjunction with Leo White’s arms deals before, officially a model still in research and development that was officially called a Sweeper but colloquially known as a Room Broom, a handgun with the same specifications as a shotgun. No wonder there had been such a commotion above them when they had been trying to get out. Zelena did not appear to be armed, but the crazed look in her eyes was more than enough to send a shiver down Belle’s spine. When Gold entered the room, leaning on Daniel since Killian had taken his cane, the redhead’s eyes widened and she licked her lips. 

“Well if it isn’t the delicious Agent Gold,” she said. “Did you enjoy my company so much that you came back for round two?” She crossed the room leisurely, running a fingertip down his cheek. “I did miss you, darling. It’s been no fun without you around.”

In response, Gold backhanded her around the face. She hissed, her eyes flashing dangerously as she dabbed at her cheek, and Gold brought a hand up to block her before she could return the favour. Killian just gave a snort of laughter as he manhandled Regina into the middle of the room. 

“Zelena, dear, leave him alone,” Cora said. She sounded bored. “You’ll get to play with him later, no use breaking your toys now. Charles!”

The muscular man cocked his gun, levelling it at Gold, to whom he was closest in the room. Belle knew enough about the Sweeper to know that if he fired at this close range, all that would remain of Gold above the waist would be a red mist splattered against the wall. Her stomach churned, thinking of Graham in the safehouse above them and hoping that he was all right up there. 

“Not him, you fool, I want him alive!” Zelena snapped. Charles retrained his gun on Belle instead, motioning for her to put her hands on her head with jerky movements, the gun heavy and unwieldy in his hand. His obvious inexperience with the weapon gave Belle a little hope for Graham’s survival. Zelena returned her attention to Gold. “I’ve got all sorts of lovely new games to play with you, my dear. We’re going to have so much fun.” She grabbed the arm he wasn’t using to support himself and twisted sharply. Gold’s face contorted in pain but he remained silent, automatically shutting down, endurance training from years ago kicking in again. Defiant to the last in the face of his torturer, he spat in her face. 

“You’re going to regret that,” Zelena snarled. 

“Zelena!” Cora snapped. “We have bigger fish to fry here!” She got up and came across the room towards her daughter, smiling benevolently and touching her cheek, soothing her as she struggled against Killian’s chokehold on her. “Oh Regina, my darling. After everything I’ve given you in this life, everything that I did to ensure that you had the very best of this world, and this is how you choose to repay me? Do I mean so little to you?”

“I don’t understand how you found me,” Regina said. “My phone, my computer, I left everything at the house, Killian didn’t know where I was coming, how did you track us down?”

“You’re a sentimental one, Regina,” Cora said with a shake of her head, tutting in disapproval. “It was a trait that I always tried to discourage in you, and for good reason.” She grabbed Regina’s hand, holding it up between them, and the small costume stone in Regina’s ring caught the light. “I know diamonds, darling, and this little beauty is glass. I knew that there was only one person in the world who would buy you fake stones, and I knew that you never wore this ring before today. But I also knew that being the sentimental fool that you are, you wouldn’t be able to leave with your pathetic lover without taking with you this little piece of your tomfoolery, just in case something went tragically wrong, you’d always have a piece of him with you. It’s really quite nauseating when you think about it.” She yanked the ring off Regina’s finger and prised the stone off it, showing her the neat little tracking device beneath it. “It was really as simple as that. You should listen to your mother’s advice, darling. It might save your skin.”

“I hate you,” Regina snarled. 

“All girls hate their mothers at some point in their lives, my dear,” Cora said. “Your rebellious phase has come a little late, but like all things, it’s something that can be stamped out of you. You’re an adult, Regina, and it’s time to start thinking about these things like a grown up instead of a spoiled child.”

Regina scoffed. “If I’m a spoiled child, it’s only because you made me that way. You were the one who drove me to this! I am not you, Mother, I don’t want to be like you! All I ever wanted was my own life but you treat me like a piece of meat! A bargaining chip for your high-flying deals! You want to whore me out to Leo White to distract him long enough for you to get his head on a platter and then what? Which of your rivals will it be next, because I’m young and pretty and fertile enough to get a few more husbands under my belt before I’m thirty-five!”

“Regina, stop this,” Cora said coolly. “You’re being hysterical.”

“I’m being held at gunpoint on your orders!”

“Regina! It’s really very simple. You can watch Zelena work her particular brand of magic on the other three miscreants in this room, or you can come back with me quietly and do as you’re told.”

“It’s too late anyway!” Regina yelled. “They’ve already got all the information they need to take you out, it’s all safe elsewhere, it doesn’t matter what happens to me, or them, or anyone!”

“Regina, dear, we find our information leaks and we plug them. We always do. Wherever the intelligence you stole has gone, it has gone somewhere, and we have the resources at our disposal-“ here she nodded to Zelena “-to find it.”

Regina was panting, the wind taken out of her sails with the force of her tirade against her mother and the constant pressure of Killian’s arm around her neck. With a final yell of frustration, she slammed her foot down on Killian’s and elbowed him in the groin. The double agent swore and let go of her momentarily before lashing out with his gun and catching the side of her head. Regina staggered into Cora’s waiting arms.

“Fool!” Cora yelled to Killian. “You don’t damage the merchandise! I can’t hand her over to White with her face scratched up! I told you to be careful!” 

Belle’s hackles raised. Had she really just called her own daughter  _ merchandise _ ?

“Besides, there’s a much simpler way to get Regina to behave herself, isn’t there sweetheart?” Cora cooed, reaching into her handbag and pulling out a delicate, pearl-handled revolver, a weapon so quaintly old fashioned in the midst of all their top range firepower. Barely sparing a second glance, she pulled the trigger, shooting Daniel squarely in the chest. 

“Daniel no!”

Regina threw off her mother’s hold on her, ignorant of the blood pouring down her face from the gash over her right temple, and she raced across the room as Daniel fell to the ground, sending Gold sprawling as well, his bad ankle giving out completely and toppling him. Belle took half a step towards them on instinct, but then Charles and the Sweeper were in front of her, the barrel of the gun pressed into her own chest. 

“Daniel!” 

Belle had been in all sorts of deadly situations before. She had been in simulations of many more. She had never yet faced a stand-off like this one. There was no way to win, she realised. Their opponents had got the drop on them; Cora had bested them like she always did, and there was to be no coming back from this one. Once again, they had walked straight into a trap of her preparing, just as Gold had done on his own all those years ago, but this time, it was worse. The stakes were so much higher. 

“I told you,” Cora said plainly. “Oh, do man up, Killian, your crown jewels will heal but your head won’t if I put a bullet through your skull for your sheer stupidity. Now Regina, dear, might you reconsider your proposal now that there’s really no point in running away any more?”

Regina was not paying her mother any attention; she was focussed solely on Daniel, talking to him, keeping him conscious as she tried to stem the blood flow from his wound, scarlet seeping steadily over her fingers as she ripped off her shirt and bunched it up as a compress. It was clear that her entire world had been reduced to just her and Daniel, and the life-threatening situation that she had ended up in the middle of was just periphery in her mind. Cora rolled her eyes. “Well, it looks like we’ll have to wait for him to die before we get any kind of answer out of her. Still, there are other things to be getting on with.” She crossed the room to Gold, who was staggering unsteadily to his feet. Zelena held out a hand to help him with a look of faux concern, but he refused her. 

“I really am intrigued as to why you dragged yourself over here after all these years,” Cora said, watching him struggle with an amused expression. “I mean, it’s hardly the best holiday destination in the world and you know that you’re still technically a wanted man here. My late husband and father-in-law were popular and influential people and I know that there are still several people out there screaming for justice for their killer.” She smiled sweetly. “Knowing all this, I can’t fathom why the service would send you. Unless…”

She looked from Gold to Regina on the floor and back again, giving a squawk of laughter. “Unless you thought she was yours. Oh my word, Gold, you really thought she was yours and you came all the way back out here to rescue your baby girl from her big bad Mommy.” She burst off into peals of laughter again. “Oh Zelena, he’s all yours. The look on his face is worth it all.”

Zelena grabbed Gold’s chin, turning his face towards her, and for the first time, Belle saw genuine terror in his eyes, and she knew she had to act fast. In that moment, time slowed down. She focussed on her heartbeat pounding in her ears, and forced herself to focus. Emma was pinned down in the garden by an unknown number of assailants, her condition unknown. Graham was upstairs in the safehouse, definitely injured and possibly dead. Daniel was bleeding out on the floor, Regina was tending to him and on the verge of hysteria. Gold was quite possibly about to pop his cyanide. She only had seconds to act. 

It was quite possibly the rashest, most stupid decision that she had ever made in her life, and she knew that the only way she would get away with it would be because it was something that her attacker would not anticipate her doing. 

With a roar, she launched herself forward against the barrel in her chest and shoved Charles away from her, making him stagger, and she kicked out, knocking the gun from his hands and rushing him again. She was never going to be able to take him in hand to hand combat, he was twice her size in all directions, but she could certainly antagonise him and cause a distraction. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Killian let go of his privates and aim his gun at her. 

The shot was very loud in the small room, and the silence that followed it was positively deafening. 

For what seemed like an age, although it could only have been less than a minute, Belle was convinced that she was dead. She couldn’t hear anything, and she couldn’t feel any pain. It was only once she took in the rest of the room that she realised that the bullet had missed her. 

In fact, the bullet hadn’t gone anywhere near her, because Killian had not been the one to fire. Instead, all eyes in the room turned to the centre as Cora fell to the ground, dark mulberry rapidly staining the floor beneath her. Regina was holding Daniel’s sidearm in shaking hands, silent tears streaming down her face as she stared, unseeing, at where her mother had been standing the moment before. All eyes in the room were on her, and Charles and Killian, completely wrong-footed by the death of their paymaster, looked at each other in total confusion. Then movement returned, as Gold took advantage of the distraction to loose himself from Zelena’s grasp, grabbing the woman by a handful of hair and slamming her head against the wall. She slumped down with a groan, losing consciousness immediately, and Belle ran to grab the Sweeper from where it had fallen from Charles’s hand during their scuffle, and she trained the weapon on the larger man, backing him up against the wall beside Zelena’s crumpled form. 

“Don’t move.”

Killian also took advantage of the distraction caused by Cora’s fall to shove his weapon in his belt and make a break for the door. Belle turned to fire after him but he was already gone, and she did not want to leave the room. She returned to covering Charles and Zelena, watching Gold out of the corner of her eye. He limped heavily across the room and bent to take Cora’s pulse, giving her Belle a curt nod of confirmation. Cora Mills, the Queen of Diamonds, was dead. He left the body, moving over to Regina, who was still holding the gun, frozen in place. 

“Regina,” he said softly, kneeling beside her. “Regina, sweetheart, give me the gun.”

He closed his hand over hers on the pistol and she relinquished her hold on it, pressing her hands over her face and dissolving into a flood of tears. Gold flicked the safety on and put the gun beside him on the ground before turning his attention to Daniel. The younger man had lost consciousness and his skin had a horrible deathly pallor, but he was still breathing, and he looked over at Belle. 

“We need an ambulance stat; I’ll cover those two, you get upstairs to send a flash to Mal.” He picked up the gun that he’d taken from Regina and trained it on Charles and Zelena, his other hand doing what he could to try and help Daniel. Belle needed no further encouragement, racing out of the room and up into the safehouse. On her way past the room where they’d been monitoring the CCTV, she saw Graham crouched in the corner, wedged down behind an easy chair. 

“Graham, are you..”

“I’m hit in the leg but I’ll be ok!” he called from his position. “I sent a flash to Mal, the residency should be sending in backup any moment now. Just… an ambulance sounds like a great idea at the moment.”

Belle wasted no time, grabbing her phone and placing an emergency call, calmly stating that two people had suffered gunshot wounds in a domestic dispute and answering all the dispatcher’s questions before hanging up; naturally given the state of Daniel and Graham, they needed medical attention as soon as possible, but there was going to be a hell of a lot of explaining to do considering their current situation. She looked out of the bust open front door to see a familiar white van careening down the road and pulling up outside the safehouse, the plates were different to the ones they’d used the previous day, but Mal, Rory and Leroy all jumped out. 

“I reckon we’ve got eight minutes before the ambulances arrive,” Belle said as they rushed into the house, Leroy shouldering the ruined door closed after them. “I’ve got Cora dead, Graham and Daniel bleeding all over the place, Gold holding down Charles and Zelena in Graham’s apartment, Killian’s done a bunk and Emma’s held down outside.”

“Fear not, Killian’s not done a bunk and Emma’s not held down outside.” Emma came through the house with Killian at gunpoint, his hands cable-tied together. “Sorry I couldn’t get in touch, one of his mates jumped me and knocked my earpiece offline. The guy in question split but I thought it would be better to get this one rather than go after the muscle. I believe this is yours,” she said, nudging him forwards towards Mal, who raised an unimpressed eyebrow. 

“I’m sure you’re aware, Killian, that I’m not known for leniency. Leroy, take care of our lovely traitor. As for the rest of it all, we’re going to need a cover story, and fast, and you, Gold and Regina have to get out of here as quickly as possible. I don’t want you still here when the authorities arrive, that will open up a whole other can of worms. Who killed Cora?”

“Regina,” Belle said. Mal let out a low whistle of approval as she pulled on a pair of latex gloves, moving through the house towards the room in which the massacre had taken place. 

“That girl is going to need so much therapy,” she muttered under her breath. When they arrived back in Graham’s living room, Mal and Rory immediately started faking the scene. Regina had calmed down and was back taking care of Daniel whilst Gold provided cover. Belle noticed that Charles had also lost consciousness and she was pretty sure that had been achieved by means of the butt of a gun. 

“Emma, can you go down into the cellars and check our exit route is clear?” Belle asked. The blonde woman smacked her earpiece against her palm a couple of times, listened to it and gave a nod before reinserting it into her ear. 

“On it.”

She sped out of the room, Mal and Rory were working out the cover story between them. 

“Cora’s known to use safehouse locations like this to do deals in,” she said. “She came to a deal that went south; Daniel took a bullet to protect her but couldn’t prevent a second shot…”

_ “Belle this is Emma, you’re clear _ .”

“Copy.” 

Belle went over to Regina and Gold. 

“We have to leave, now.”

“No!” Regina exclaimed. “I can’t leave him!”

“Regina, you have to. If we’re still here when the police and ambulance crews arrive then you’re not going to get out of the country, period. The plane leaves at six and we have to be on it.” There was no time for pussyfooting; Belle could hear the sirens blazing down the street. Mal went to greet them and Rory came across to take over first aid on Daniel. 

“Go!” she said. “If you’re still here they’ll start asking what the hell happened!”

“We’re leaving,” Gold said, taking Regina’s shoulders in a firm grip and pulling her off the floor. He grabbed his cane from where Killian had discarded it, keeping his free arm around Regina as he bundled her out of the room and towards the kitchen and the their way out. Belle brought up the rear with their gear, gun still at the ready, and Emma met them at the cellar door, running point as they made their way under the terrace of houses through the darkness, just the light from Emma’s pocket flashlight illuminating the debris strewn path ahead of them and the small square of light at the far end that showed freedom. The four of them scrambled through the hole, out into the overgrown garden at the end of the terrace and into the narrow alley that led down between the streets. They were out. All they had to do now was leave the country. 

Emma made them wait at the end of the alleyway, pulling off her jacket and handing it to Regina, whose shirt was still bandaging Daniel, and she stepped out into the street, looking around before motioning for them to follow her. They wound around a few streets into a quiet area before she stopped, pulling a screwdriver from the pocket of her jeans and jacking open a small car.

“All right, everyone in. One ride to the airport coming up.”

“We’re stealing a car?” Regina asked. 

Emma shrugged. “Desperate times call for desperate measures and I think someone might notice us if we get in a taxi like this.” She jumped into the driver’s seat and got the engine turning over; Regina and Gold got into the back with the gear and Belle took shotgun, still looking out for anyone that might be following them. “Regina, Gold, you’re going to want to maybe get rid of the bloodstains.” She rummaged through the glovebox and tossed a pack of wetwipes into the back. “If there’s one thing every woman should know, it’s how to change in a moving vehicle. If you can change whilst you’re driving the vehicle, that’s even better.”

Regina gave a weak snort of laughter as she cleaned her hands and face and rummaged in her backpack for another top; Gold doing likewise. Emma was taking them through the back roads, and it shouldn’t take them long to reach the airport hopefully undetected. 

With Gold and Regina cleaned up, the car fell into a tense silence, Belle keeping watch and Emma concentrating on the road. Regina was shaking violently, her hands pressed over her face again as she tried to keep it together. Without any prompting, Gold put his arms around her and she leaned in against him. 

“It’s all right,” he soothed. “It’s all over now. It’s all going to be ok. You’re going to be safe, I promise. I’ve got you.”

The airport came into sight, and Emma pulled into a side street so that they could abandon the car. Belle looked up at the skies and the plane just taking off, thinking about everything that had happened since they had arrived only a few short days ago. In spite of it all, their assignment had been, so far, a grim kind of success.

They had Regina, and they were almost home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Remington Roomsweeper, affectionately known as a Room Broom, is a fictional firearm available to players in the tabletop RPG _Shadowrun_ , which I play. My character uses one.


	15. Chapter 15

**Fifteen**

Belle couldn’t quite believe that it was over. She was still having trouble processing the fact that not only was she still alive, but that everyone else involved in the case was still alive, and that she was back home a free woman and not rotting somewhere underground in an Avalon prison. Even more astonishing was the fact that Regina was safe and sound as well. Graham was recovering well from his injuries and was back in the safehouse, and although Mal’s message about Daniel had been guarded, Belle got the impression that he was well on the way to making a full recovery as well. They had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat; so much had happened in so few seconds to turn the tables, and now here they were. 

Blue, needless to say, was absolutely furious.

“Honestly,” Emma moaned from her desk in the bullpen, laying down her pen and paperwork and resting her head on the desk with a groan. “You’d think that she’d be happy that none of us are dead, at least.”

“Emma, you’ve read the  _ Foresight _ file,” Belle pointed out. “You know how little respect for human life Blue has. It’s all about the intelligence. Now that Cora’s dead, there’s nothing to be gained. The entire assignment was a huge waste of time and resources in her eyes, and Cora’s now unable to answer for her crimes or stand trial.”

“But she’ll never cause any more trouble again!” Emma exclaimed. “I don’t understand how she can’t think that this is a good thing. If everything had gone off without a hitch and we’d extracted Regina as we’d planned and got all the information out of her during debrief, then it could still have taken years for us actually to bring down Cora, even with the inside source.” She paused, finally lifting her head off her paperwork and detaching the post-it note that had become adhered to her cheek. “I mean, I understand that it’s always bad when lives are lost during an assignment, be they our own people or the other side. I know that we strive to do everything with the minimum of bloodshed, but really, sometimes these things are the only way. Even with Regina’s evidence I don’t think that we could have broken Cora. I think that killing her was the only way to do it.”

“I think it’s more that the decision was taken out of Blue’s hands that’s making her so angry.” Belle leaned back in her chair, chewing on the end of her pen as she pondered. It was not unheard of for the agency to order assassinations of marks, but there was a separate team dedicated to those kinds of assignments, the ‘cleaners’ who got all the messy jobs. As it was, the agency had not made that decision. It had been made for them, by a terrified young woman in fear of both her own life and the lives of people she cared about. “And I think that she wanted to get Zelena grilled on some of her torture and interrogation methods so that we can get the human rights lawyers involved. Or use them ourselves, that’s possible.”

Emma glanced over to Blue’s office, the other woman was talking on the phone and looking her usual calm, unruffled self. “More likely, if you ask me,” she muttered darkly. “We completed our objective. We extracted Regina. Why we have to go through so much debrief for an assignment that succeeded…” She threw her squashy duck stress reliever at the wall; it bounced off and hit Blue’s office window, and their superior gave Emma a filthy look. Emma, for her part, merely rolled her eyes and went to retrieve the duck, whilst David Nolan tried and failed to stop himself from bursting out laughing.

“Shut up,” Emma snapped. “Or I’ll throw Floyd at you.”

David did not stop laughing, and he soon found himself under attack from a small duck. It was at that point that Blue finished her phone call and came out of her office. 

“Swan! Nolan! You’re in the middle of a complex debrief and I need those reports before the end of the day! There’s no time for you to be acting like children!”

Emma just glowered, going back to her desk and making a show of spreading out all her papers in front of her. Blue’s nostrils flared and she turned to go back into her office.

“French!”

Belle rolled her eyes, suppressed a sigh and gathered up the operation file, following Blue into the claustrophobic room that served as her office. The door had barely swung shut when there came an almighty commotion from outside the bullpen, and the entire team turned in the direction of the door as the raised voices came ever closer. 

“Sir, really, you can’t go…” someone was saying frantically, to which a wonderfully familiar Scottish brogue replied.

“Until they lockdown my security access I can go wherever I damn well please.”

Blue went rather pale. “Why does Gold still have security access?” she asked faintly of no-one in particular.

“Because we’re still in debrief,” Belle replied sweetly. “He’s still got access whilst you’re still asking him for reports.”

Blue gave a long-suffering sigh and pinched the bridge of her nose, going to sit back behind her desk. Belle saw her pop a couple of aspirin, and she smiled. The bitch deserved whatever was coming her way, headache included. 

There was the electronic clunk of the bullpen door unlocking, and it slammed open with ferocious force. Gold was standing in the frame, sharp suited, cane in one hand, plastic wallet of paperwork clenched almost beyond recognition in the other, and the sight he presented was one of beautifully incandescent rage. It was like the moment in a film where the presumed-dead hero picks himself up and comes striding in to save the day. The junior officer hovering in the door behind him decided it was best to cut her losses and she scampered away. If Gold had clearance to be in this bullpen then she wasn’t going to stop him using it, and she wasn’t going to cross Blue if at all possible. 

“Fae!” Gold growled. “Fae, you’d bloody better be in here!”

He strode into the room, a larger than life figure despite his small stature, the healing wounds on his face and neck just lending ever more gravitas and strength to his appearance, and Belle side-stepped to allow him into Blue’s office, closing the door behind them to give the illusion of privacy, although knowing Gold as she did, she was certain that in the confrontation to come, the others outside would be able to hear exactly what was going on. 

He slammed the wallet down on the desk and pushed it towards Blue, looming over her across the polished wood. Blue’s hand inched across her desk towards her phone and Gold swept the receiver off his desk with the handle of his cane. For a moment, Belle’s hand twitched, almost going to her service weapon. Gold was fuming, a state that she hadn’t seen him in before, and in that moment, he looked downright dangerous. When he spoke at last, his voice was a sharp whisper, hissed through his teeth. 

“You told me she was mine.”

Blue looked from the plastic wallet to Gold, her cool, emotionless eyes meeting his impassioned ones. 

“Yes,” she said coldly. “I did.”

Gold took a step back, not sitting down but no longer the looming, predatory figure that he had been before, and Belle’s hand relaxed. He leaned heavily on his cane, as if that initial burst of anger had taken it out of him and he no longer had the will to fight furiously in the face of Blue’s immoveable steel. 

“You told me that she was mine because you knew that I would drop everything and go to her,” he growled. “You knew that after what you did to my son, I would jump at the chance to make sure that nothing happened to my daughter. You used me, Blue. You used my son against me before and you used him against me again now!”

“I did what I had to do to make you accept the assignment,” Blue replied. “And nothing you can bluster and shout and threaten me with will make me regret what I did. Although the assignment could have been completed a lot more cleanly,” here she looked at Belle, “it achieved its aim, one that would not have been achieved without your co-operation. Of course I manipulated you. I had a job to do, and in a line of work such as ours, we cannot afford to let emotions get in the way of that. I would have thought that was a lesson you would have learned well after your last assignment in Avalon. Wasn’t it your tender feelings for Cora Mills that got you into this entire mess in the first place?”

“Don’t try to pretend that wasn’t your idea, Blue,” Gold snarled, and he smacked his fist against the plastic wallet again. “You told me that she was mine, you sent me out there to what was almost my death on false pretences. You knew.”

Belle came closer to the table and saw the top sheet of the paperwork in the crumpled wallet. It was Regina’s medical notes from the House, including DNA. It was there in damning black and white; Regina and Gold were not related by blood. 

Gold gave a harsh bark of laughter. “You’re a first class bitch, Fae, but then you always were. As long as you get what you want, it doesn’t matter who you screw over.” 

“We’re in international intelligence,” Blue replied levelly. “Screwing people over is our job.”

“We don’t screw over our own,” Gold snapped. “We don’t leave our own agents in the hands of sadistic psychopaths for two fucking years because it’s not convenient for us to have them back. We don’t take away everything that one of our own has left and then use that loss to make them do the one thing they promised they would never do again, to send them back to the place that took so much away from them, to send them out to die under false pretences. We don’t do that to our own people.”

Blue’s hard expression was unwavering in the face of Gold’s ire. “We do what we have to in the name of national security,” she said. “Anything that we have to.”

“You and your godforsaken greater good.” Gold picked his security access card out of his jacket pocket and tossed it onto the desk; it skittered across and fell into Blue’s lap. “Since you’ll have my access revoked as soon as I’m out of the building after this little stunt, you might as well have it. I’m done, Fae. Done with your lies, done with you trying to rip me and my family apart in the name of international security. But you’re going to do one thing for me. One last little favour after everything that I’ve done for you.”

“What might that be?” Blue asked. 

“Bae. You’re going to give me Bae’s files.”

“They’re locked down, Gold. You can’t just walk out of here with them.”

“I’m not intending to. But I’ll keep reminding you, until you give me what I want. As I’m sure you’ll remember from those good old days, I can be very persuasive.”

He turned on his heel, and gave Belle a polite nod. “Agent French, perhaps you would care to escort me from the building.”

“I would be glad to, Agent Gold.”

“French, get back here!” Blue snapped as Belle left her office, gathering up her coat and handbag from her desk and locking up her workstation. 

“I’m cashing in my overtime,” Belle called over her shoulder as she swiped Gold out of the bullpen. 

Once they were in the elevator going down to the entrance, Gold sagged, leaning heavily on his cane and the lift wall, flexing his bad ankle. The beating he’d taken in Avalon had aggravated old wounds best left unopened, and Belle could tell that the display of force in Blue’s office had really taken it out of him. 

“She’s going to make your life hell for this,” he said, looking up at Belle from his slumped position. “Nobody walks out on Fae Blue.”

“It was worth whatever she throws at me,” Belle said. 

“I don’t really know what it’s achieved,” Gold said. “Other than the determination to get Bae’s files by any means necessary. It’s information that should have been released to me before, so there’s no reason why I can’t have it now. She’ll try and fudge it in some way, but she’ll have to give up in the end. Patience is a virtue.”

They reached reception and Belle swiped him out of the building entirely, stepping out into the November afternoon after him.

“So what happens now?” she asked him.

“Now I go back to Scotland, and try to forget that all this ever happened.” Gold sighed. “But before then, I have a package to collect, and I was wondering if you would care to accompany me.”

Belle raised an eyebrow. “What kind of package?”

“Regina’s debrief is complete,” Gold replied. “I’m going to collect her from the House and take her home.”

Belle smiled. “In that case, I would love to come.”

They made the drive to the House in silence for the most part, but as they were pulling up to the gates and Belle was showing her credentials to the security guard, she felt that she had to ask the question that had been burning at the back of her mind throughout the journey, ever since the revelation of Regina’s true parentage.

“Did you suspect that Regina wasn’t yours at any point?” she asked as they continued up the driveway towards the complex. 

Gold shook his head. “No. Not even when Cora was taunting me. I knew that she just wanted to get under my skin and rile me, and I thought that she was just saying it for my reaction. To be honest, I think it would have been quite hard for her to tell whose child Regina was; I don’t think she knew herself unless she’d got her hands on DNA results. It was only after we got back here that the slight doubt started to creep into my mind. I know what Blue’s like, and I know that this information would have been gold dust to her, no pun intended. All of a sudden, once I was back here, it struck me just how convenient it was that she’d got her hands on this intel just at the time when she needed it. I hadn’t questioned it at the time because I’d always suspected Regina was mine. She just played all the right cards and I played right into her hands, like I always do.” Gold sighed, flexing his fingers on the steering wheel as they crept up the drive. “There’s something about Blue that’s always been able to get under my skin, even before everything happened twenty years ago. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t have anyone of her own that she cares about like we care about our loved ones. She doesn’t understand the ferocity of the bonds that we share. She’s married to the service and always has been. It’s not a choice that I can criticise; that’s what she wants to do. But I do think that it affects the way she views other people’s relationships, as if love and companionship is somehow beneath her.”

Belle nodded, she could understand exactly where he was coming from. They reached the House carpark and Gold looked up at the magnificent building with a sigh. 

“With any luck, this will be the last time that I see the place. It’s a shame. There are some good memories here in among all the bad ones.”

“Granny said that you and Mal were quite the team when it came to making trouble whilst you were training,” Belle said. 

“Oh, we ran her absolutely ragged.” Gold chuckled. “Sometimes she couldn’t believe that we were grown adults rather than teenagers. You’d never think it to look at us now, of course, both the picture of respectability.”

It wasn’t respectability as such, more just the fact that life had caught up with them. After everything that had happened over the past twenty years, neither Mal nor Gold looked like they had been pranksters in their younger days, but sometimes, when Gold smiled, Belle could see the traces of the man that he had once been fight their way through to the surface. He smiled more readily now, she noticed as they moved around the House building to the entrance. Handing in his security clearance and cutting his ties with Blue and the service seemed to have done him the world of good and taken a weight off his mind. 

Ruby greeted them as they entered the House. When they had first arrived back with Regina, bruised and battered and barely having made it, the other woman had been unable to let go of Belle for about five minutes, so glad to see her alive and well after everything that had happened. 

“It’s all quiet on the western front,” she said. “Mal’s been sending us regular direct updates in addition to the reports she’s sending to Blue. She says that everything’s normal, the police bought the story of Cora’s death and are sweeping the whole thing under the rug. Although everyone over there knew that she was involved in some very suspect activities, they don’t exactly want to advertise it. They’ve got some people sniffing around about Regina’s absence, but nothing they can’t handle. The inquisitors have finished, she was perfectly co-operative and they don’t think that there’s anything more to be gained from mining her for more information now that Cora is out of the picture; her network will have gone underground, but the Avalon office will be ready to pounce on them when they do emerge. Considering what happened, I’d say that it was a very successful assignment, but no doubt Blue feels differently. I’m amazed she let you out of the office, to be honest.”

Belle snorted. She knew that she’d get so much flack when she returned later, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. Some things were more important. 

“She’s through here.”

Ruby led them out into the quad, a central courtyard that the sprawling house complex was built around, with the main stately home as its front façade and other more modern extensions covering the other three sides. The space was made into a small garden so that those who were under lockdown in the house and not able to leave the building could still enjoy the sunshine and fresh air. Regina was sitting on a bench, her rucksack at her feet. The dye had long since washed out of her hair and it curled around her face where Belle had cut it. She smiled when she saw the two agents coming towards her. 

“Ruby says I’m free,” she said. “I guess you’re my escort out of here.”

“That we are.” Gold crossed the quad and sat down beside her. “How’ve they been treating you?”

“Good. I’m not going to lie, I was half-expecting thumbscrews and waterboarding, but we just talked. It’ll be nice to get out of here though, it’s a lovely building but I’m used to the open air. Stupid really, the thing I miss most about home is my horse.” She grinned and turned to Gold. “Mal sent me a message this morning, Daniel’s doing well and they’re going to get him moved over here at the end of next week.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

There was a long pause then, and Belle felt a little awkward, like a third wheel hovering by the doors, and she feigned interest in her phone. This was a moment between two people who had built such a close bond over so few days without really knowing each other, and who had just had the rug pulled out from under their feet. 

“Regina,” Gold began presently, his voice gentle, “I’m not quite sure of the most delicate way to put this, but you’ve got to know that I’m not your father.”

Regina nodded. “I know. I’ve always known. Ever since Mama told me about you and I started suspecting that you were, she set the record straight.”

“If you knew, why did you want me to be the one to come and get you?” Gold asked. There was a little edge in his voice now, a hint of steel at the idea that Regina had used his feelings for her in the same way that Blue had. 

“Because you were the only person I knew who’d gone up against Cora.”

“I lost,” Gold pointed out. “If you were looking for a stellar example of intelligence operations, that wasn’t one.”

“I don’t mean it like that. I don’t really know what I mean. I mean, she’d screwed you over just like she kept screwing me over. I kind of felt like we were kindred spirits, in a way. And I know it’s stupid but I’d always thought of you more as a father figure than my actual father. I never met either of you, but you were always the one I had in mind when I imagined someone coming to rescue me from the nightmare I was living. My real father was dead, I knew that there was nothing he could do. But you were still out there, you still had the same kind of feelings towards Cora as I did… I felt certain that if anyone would help and want to get some kind of revenge on her, you would.”

There was a long pause, and Gold’s hand closed over Regina’s on the bench beside him. 

“The blood of the covenant runs thicker than the water of the womb,” he said. “I don’t regret coming to get you, Regina. I never will. And I promise that I will continue to keep you safe. And Daniel when he gets here, although I’m sure he can do a better job of protecting you than I can. Come on, let’s get you out of here.”

Regina picked up her bag and they both got to their feet, coming back towards Belle. 

“I’ll stay here a while,” she said, conscious of the fact that she really needed to leave the two of them alone together to get themselves sorted out and work out where their strange little friendship was going. “Ruby can give me a lift back to HQ later.” 

This was it, the parting of the ways. She shook hands with Regina, who took a pointed look between the two of them and ducked inside the house to give them some time alone. 

“Thank you for everything, Belle,” Gold said. “I could not have hoped for a better, more resilient or more caring partner than you.”

He shook her hand, pressing his lips against her cheek in a gesture of farewell. For a long moment, looking into his eyes as they broke apart, Belle wondered what he was thinking, if he wanted to kiss her as badly as she wanted to kiss him. 

“You’re very welcome,” she said eventually. 

There was another moment of silence screaming with unsaid words, and then Gold gave her a wan smile and moved into the house. Belle remained standing in the doorway, her fingers pressed against her cheek, feeling the memory of his lips there. 

 


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End of the line. Enjoy the last chapter, folks!

Scotland was beautiful in the sunshine, and Belle turned her face up to the bright warmth as she stepped out of the hire car. It was winter after all, even if the sun was shining, and she needed all the warmth that she could get. It was the first time that she'd been here when it hadn't been grey and raining, and now that she could see it without a haze of mist around it, she could really appreciate how stunning the countryside was, even in the middle of January. Of course, the good weather had the slight disadvantage that there were more people out and about in the little town, and every one of them stopped and stared at her as she made her way across the street towards the antiques shop on the corner. She supposed that she was something of an unusual sight; she couldn't imagine that the town got newcomers very often and after the arrival of Regina and Daniel it must seem like they were being overrun by outsiders. 

Nevertheless, Belle shook off the suspicious stares and continued on towards her destination. She couldn't believe that it was almost three months since she had last entered the place; despite everything that had happened in the meantime the memory was still so vivid that it could have been yesterday. As she reached Gold's shop, however, she saw that her grand plans were scuppered by the neat hand-lettered sign on the door saying 'closed'. She peered in through the glass, but the shop was dark; she'd wondered if perhaps he was just on a lunch break and would be back shortly, but it didn't look like the shop had seen any life all day. Oh well. It wasn't the end of the world by any manner or means, it just meant that she would have to go back to her car and do a little bit more digging into his home address from her files. She looked down at the manila folder she was carrying, much like the confidential file she'd brought him from Blue those weeks before. This time, she had no qualms about looking at the contents. Indeed, she and Emma had been the ones to compile them. 

She meandered back down the road, past her car, in the direction of the corner shop. There was no reason why she couldn't indulge in some chocolate to warm her up as she waited for Gold to emerge from wherever he was. If he was taking time to get Regina and Daniel settled into their new home, then she couldn't really blame him for not being around. The relationship between the two of them was still so strong in spite of the revelations and in spite of the brevity of it. As she approached the shop, however, she raised an eyebrow, thinking that perhaps Gold might be closer than she thought. There were two black and white border collie dogs sitting outside the shop. Neither had a leash, but both had collars, and Belle remembered one of her first conversations with Gold, when he'd told her about his dogs. She crouched down beside them, pulling off her gloves and offering them a hand each to sniff. They didn't pay her all that much mind having decided that she wasn't a threat, and Belle took a closer look at the tags on their collars. 

Chip and Imp. Of course. 

"Hello there, girls," she said. "Where's your papa got to then?"

The two dogs just gave her an unimpressed look, then turned in unison to the shop door as the bell jangled and it opened, and the butt of a familiar cane appeared in view. Belle stood up quickly, brushing herself off, and the two dogs also stood, padding over to Gold as he exited the shop. He gave Belle a smile when he saw her, raising an eyebrow and turning his head on one side when he saw the folder tucked under her arm. 

"As delighted as I am to see you, Belle, I did make my feelings towards being part of the service again clear when I spoke to Blue, as I'm sure you heard."

"Oh, I think that the entire building heard you," Belle replied, giving him a cheeky smile. "Don't worry. I'm actually here to uphold Blue's end of the bargain. Well, not exactly. She didn't do anything, she just didn't stop me and Emma from doing anything." She fingered the edge of the file. "Could we perhaps go somewhere private? I don't think that this is really something that should be done in the doorway of a corner shop."

Gold nodded, still eyeing the folder. "Yes. If that's what I think it is, then I think that privacy would be order of the day. Come on. The shop's not open today but I'll make an exception for an old friend."

They were still getting some very strange looks from the locals as they made their way back down to the antiques shop, but somehow, the fact that Chip and Imp seemed to have accepted Belle whole-heartedly and were trotted along happily at her and Gold's heels made people think that there was nothing untoward in Belle's sudden appearance. You could trust a dog's judgment, after all. 

"Go on through to the back," Gold said after he'd let them in and was relocking the door behind them. "Make yourself at home; I apologise for the cold."

The dogs padded past her through the curtain into the back and jumped up onto the small couch there, settling in for the duration. Unfortunately, that left Belle with nowhere to sit except at the one chair at the workbench. She perched on the desk, which earned her another raised eyebrow from Gold. He saw the dogs and sighed. 

"You are spoilt girls, you know," he muttered. "Take a seat, Belle, I've got another chair somewhere."

He went off into a corner and Belle heard some rummaging before he returned with a dining chair, which he pulled up next to hers. Belle put the folder on the table between them. 

"So..." His fingers danced across the worn wood, coming to rest on the file, but he did not open it, his courage failing him at the last moment. "This is it. Bae."

"You don't have to do anything with this information," Belle assured him. "But if you do, then we can easily set up a meeting with him. The choice is yours. If you want to let sleeping lions lie after all these years then I can fully understand that. But you deserve to have that choice, at the very least."

Gold nodded, and they stayed in silence for another minute or so before Gold opened the file. 

"His name is now Neal Cassidy," Belle explained as Gold picked up the photograph of Neal and Emma, grinning in a pizza place somewhere and goofing off for the camera. "Believe me, it was the shock of Emma's life when she found out that her husband was your son."

"He's had a good life," Gold mumbled. Belle could see that there were tears in his eyes. "He's had a good life and he's happy."

"There's more," Belle said, and she showed him the second photograph. "You have a grandson. His name's Henry. He's ten."

For a very long time, Gold did not speak. He was leaning heavily on the desk, one hand over his mouth as he gazed down at the photographs and the other documents in the folder, all relating to Bae's transformation into Neal. Tears dripped onto the desk, and Belle wondered if she ought to go and give him some privacy. She was just standing up to leave when Gold spoke. 

"I'd like to meet them," he said. "Neal, and Henry. And Emma in her capacity as my daughter in law rather than a colleague."

Belle smiled. 

"We'll get it arranged."

Gold smiled, but the expression did not quite meet his eyes. 

“What’s the matter?” Belle pressed. 

“I’d like to meet them,” he repeated, “but I don’t know if they would like to meet me.” 

“Well, Emma’s already met you, if that helps. I’m sure that she would be more than happy to act as your advocate to Neal.” Belle paused. “I can understand why you might be reluctant, but it’s not like you’ll have to launch straight into being a big happy family again. It will take time to readjust, everyone’s aware of that.”

“I know. It’s not just that, though. What about Bae – Neal? What’s he going to think when he learns that the father he thought was dead is in fact alive and was just too much of a coward to seek him out after all these years?”

“I’m sure that Neal will understand,” Belle soothed. “He’s married to Emma, and whilst he might not know exactly what it is that she does, he knows enough, and he supports her through it. He knew you that you dealt with the secret intelligence world, right? He knows that the lives we lead are full of subterfuge and that no-one knows everything, not even those that we hold most dear to us.” 

“I suppose.” Gold gave a snort of laughter. “To think that even after I was no longer part of his life, my son still ended up being embroiled in this murky world. It’s such a beautiful irony.”

“I’m not saying that it’s going to be easy and that everything will work out exactly how it’s meant to first time,” Belle said. “But if you want to begin to rebuild that bridge…”

“I do, Belle. More than anything.”

“…then you have to take that first step. It will only get harder the longer you leave it, the more you worry about what Neal’s reaction will be.”

Gold nodded. “All right. Maybe it’s time to stop hiding away from life and really live it.” He leaned back in the chair, looking again at the photos of his family. “I think in a way Avalon’s given me a new lease of life. I went out there fully expecting not to be able to come back, and here I am. Still here.”

“And now with even more reason to stay here, and to keep fighting,” Belle said. “You have your son and your grandson, and you have Regina, who I’m sure will want to keep you in her life.”

“Yes.” Gold smiled. “I was so certain that there was nothing left, that between them Cora, Zelena and Blue had taken everything worthwhile away. But in the end, they haven’t. Everything’s come full circle now. It’s a liberating feeling.”

There was a long pause. “When this happens,” he began again, a little unsurely, “will you come? Please?” There was a pleading in his dark eyes and Belle knew that it would have been impossible to refuse him when he sounded so unsure, even if she had wanted to. In everything that they had done so far, in their professional relationship, Gold had always been calm and assured, he knew what he was doing and how he was doing it, he knew how to handle all the variables. He had been an agent for so long and he had never really stopped being one after he left the service. Now that he was facing something outside of his secretive life, he had no idea where to start. But Belle, the one to whom he’d confessed the full tale of his life and what had happened to Bae, well, she had been his support in Avalon, and she could be his support now. 

“Of course I’ll come,” she said. Knowing all the circumstances as she did, this was a reunion that she wanted to witness. It would bring the case full circle, in a way, and Belle was never one to leave loose ends untied.

X

It took a few weeks to make all the necessary arrangements. Neal had been completely overwhelmed when he had discovered that the father he had long thought dead was in fact alive and well, and wanted to be reunited with him; Henry had been incredibly excited at the prospect of meeting a grandfather he’d never knew existed. But the day arrived, and Belle was sitting in her car with Gold, watching the family through the window of the coffee shop that they had agreed to meet in. It was a small place, nondescript, and a favourite haunt of agents looking to unwind and meet socially outside of the office. Emma caught sight of them and waved through the window. 

“Are you ready?” Belle asked. Gold nodded, looking anything but ready, but he got out of the car nonetheless, and he and Belle crossed the road and entered the shop. Emma touched Neal’s hand as they came in, nodding over his shoulder towards Gold, and Neal turned, standing up and taking in Gold from head to toe. 

“Dad?” he said hesitantly. 

Gold nodded. “Bae.”

Belle didn’t think that she’d ever heard so much emotion poured into one single syllable. Gold’s smile was watery but genuine, his eyes glistening, and she could see that Neal’s expression was pretty much the same. 

The two men stood there for a moment, neither really knowing what to say or do next, and the coffee shop was eerily quiet. They were the only patrons, the barista looking at them with curiosity, and Belle was on the verge of going over and ordering a coffee to provide a distraction and have two less pairs of eyes staring at the reunion going on in the middle of the place, but then Neal made his move, crossing the café and throwing his arms around Gold. 

“I thought you were dead,” he mumbled. “All these years and you’ve been here all along.”

“I’m sorry, Bae,” Gold said. “I couldn’t bring my darkness back into your life. I’d put you in danger once, I couldn’t do it again.”

Belle went over to the counter, leaving the two men to their long overdue embrace and frank conversation. Emma joined her, ordering in a round of hot chocolate for her family.

“Well, I think we can safely say that went as well as we could hope for,” she said, glancing over her shoulder as the drinks were set on trays. Belle did likewise, seeing that Neal had brought Gold over to the table and was introducing him to Henry, whose childlike enthusiasm was quickly wearing down the tension that remained in the atmosphere.

“I think I would have to agree with you there.” Belle took a sip of her coffee and leaned back against the counter, watching the three generations beginning to bond and the new ties being forged. It was a wonderful sight to behold, bringing with it the hope that after all this time, nothing was beyond repair, and she gave a little sigh. As much as she wanted to stay here and watch this little family forever, she knew that she was the odd one out here, the fifth wheel. It was probably time for her to take her leave of them and slip quietly away. She had come with Gold as she had promised, but now it was time for her to leave him to take some much needed time with his family. She grabbed a lid for her takeaway cup and pressed it on, giving Henry a wave as she made to leave.

“I guess I’ll see you in the office on Monday,” Emma said. “Back to paperwork and red tape as usual.”

“At least we can rest assured that this is one in the eye for Blue,” Belle said. “Considering that our assignment was, in a way, clean-up from  _ Foresight _ , I can’t think of a better way of bringing the Mills file to a conclusion.”

“Me neither.” 

Gold looked over his shoulder as Belle left the café, and he gave her a smile and nod of acknowledgement. Belle made her way back to her car, getting into the driver’s seat but making no move to actually turn the keys in the ignition and leave the street. She just stared unseeing at her coffee cup, wondering what would happen now. She’d grown so close to Gold during their time in Avalon; he had trusted her with parts of his past and his present that she knew he would never have revealed to anyone else. There had been something building there, and had it not been for their dramatic and hurried departure from the place, she thought that maybe something could have come of it. As things stood, everything had fallen down on top of them and it had to take precedence. Now that the fallout had been cleared away and everything was on an even keel, Belle found herself wondering more and more what could have been. She thought of the kiss that Gold had given her when they had parted ways at the House. Just a simple peck to her cheek, but the brightness in his eyes… It made her think that perhaps he wanted a little more, just like she did. Still, in the end, his family was more important than his feelings towards her, whatever they might have been, and Belle was ultimately glad that she had been able to be a part of that. 

A knock on the window broke her out of her daydream with a start and she turned sharply, one hand going immediately for the mace in her pocket. She was an agent for crying out loud, she shouldn’t be taken by surprise like this. If this was what happened when she got thinking about Gold, then maybe it was a good thing that it had not gone any further between them. 

She found that the object of her thoughts was standing outside, peering in with a little smile. She wound down the window. 

“I forgot something,” he said. “I wanted to catch you before you snapped out of your trance and drove away.” 

“Sure,” Belle said. “What did you forget?”

“Can I get in?” 

She deactivated the central locking and Gold limped around the car, settling in the passenger seat. 

“What did you forget?” Belle asked again. 

“Well, I forgot to thank you, for one,” he said. “Thank you for coming with me today, Belle. I don’t know that I would have had the courage to go in there without you by my side.”

“You’re very welcome,” Belle said. “I’m just happy that it’s all worked out so well.” There was a long pause. “Was there something else?” 

“Yes.” He paused. “It’s related to the first thing, actually. Through these past few months, throughout the time in Avalon and beyond, you’re what’s kept me going. You’ve made me so much stronger through these last months than I’ve felt for years, and I wanted you to know how much that means to me. How much you mean to me.”

Belle bit her lip. “You mean a lot to me too.”

“I’m going to be spending more time down here, to be closer to my family,” Gold said. “I was wondering… I’m not your colleague anymore, so there would be no harm in us spending a little more time together, would there? Because as much as I want to get to know Neal and Emma and Henry, all through these past months, I’ve also wanted to get to know you.”

Belle smiled. “I’d like to get to know you, too,” she said. “And I definitely can’t foresee any harm in us spending a little more time together.”

Gold’s grin was practically luminescent. It was as if today had taken years off him, he looked so much younger and happier now that he had been given this second chance, this new lease of life. After everything that he had been through, Belle couldn’t think of anyone who deserved it more than he did. 

Her lips brushed the corner of his mouth as she went to kiss his cheek, and she smiled. There would be time for that later. 

She knew that it wasn’t going to be plain sailing for them, for any of them. She and Emma were still agents after all, and their profession put their loved ones in danger. But a life without love, without family… Belle couldn’t bear to think of it. There would be risks they would have to take and tough decisions to be made, she wasn’t going to kid herself about that. But the prospects of such wonderful other things outweighed those risks enough to make it worth taking a chance. 

Time to close the book on Avalon and Cora Mills and all the pain they had caused, and start a new chapter in their lives. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end of the main story, but I will be posting a separate epilogue catching up with the progression of Gold and Belle's relationship next week. It's separate to this main fic as it will contain smut.


End file.
